


A Study in Scarlet

by Chekhovs_Power_Loader



Series: A Study in Scarlet [1]
Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BDSM, Creepypasta, Crime Fighting, Demonic Possession, Detective AU, Don’t copy to another site, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Japanese Rope Bondage, Kinbaku, Magical crimes, Mallory is Watson, Michael is Holmes, Mind Control, New York City, Oral Sex, Redemption, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Satan is Moriarty, Serial Killers, Shibari, Shower Sex, Urban Legends, Vaginal Sex, Witch Hunters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2019-10-04 00:58:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 59,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17294639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chekhovs_Power_Loader/pseuds/Chekhovs_Power_Loader
Summary: After Michael rejects his destiny as the Antichrist, he consults on various cases of interest, from magical homicides to demonic possessions.An unlikely new roommate keeps him out of trouble, but Satan really wants his son back on the warpath.





	1. Conductor of Light

**ROOMMATE WANTED for spacious brownstone in the East Village, $1000**

**Newly renovated apartment on the second floor. 2 BRM 2 BA. Close to the N and R trains. Hardwood floors, high ceilings and plenty of natural darkness. Pets welcome.**

**Me: A tidy non-smoker in his mid-20s. Keeps odd hours in an unusual line of work. Prone to melancholic fits of introspection.**

**You: A professional female. Must be comfortable with strange visitors and unexplained occurrences. Must like, or at least tolerate, snakes.**

**Air-conditioning is functional yet ineffective, as the apartment tends to overheat even in the wintertime.**

**Wifi may be intermittent. Furniture may levitate. Crows may circle the building and the sky may turn red.**

**If the electrical grid should fail, don’t panic. Power can be restored with a flick of the wrist.**

**If strange people dressed in black show up at the door, asking to worship the “Dark Lord,” simply turn them away and point to the “NO CULTISTS” sign in the window.**

**Interested parties must submit to a particular and rigorous questioning technique I like to call “cooperating.” To arrange a viewing, call 212-666-2684 (ANTI).**

 

*****

As soon as the ad lands in her inbox, Mallory knows it’s him. She can practically smell the brimstone wafting through her screen while she dials the number and waits as it continues to ring. And ring. And ring.

Will he ever pick up? Maybe he has a sixth sense about witches, even ones that are several boroughs away.

“Hello?”

The male voice on the other line is deeper than she expected. Then again, Michael Langdon hasn’t been a boy in a while. When he rejected the path of destruction his Father had set for him, he wasn’t given back the childhood he lost when he aged ten years overnight. The clock didn’t stop for him, trapping the prophesized world-destroyer in a bubble of time, chaining him up just to ensure he would never try to rise again.

Instead, Satan’s only begotten son kept right on living, growing, learning, _changing_ …

“Hi, my name is Mallory and I’m calling about the apartment on East 6th Street.” Her voice catches in her throat even as she’s shooting for confidence. “I think I may be the person you’re looking for?”

Damn. Why did she have to make it sound like a question?

“Mallory,” he says her name like it’s a philosophical concept he’s pondering. “Mallory _what_?”

“I’ll tell you my last name once we arrange a viewing.” She's desperate to regain the upper hand, and a little mystery couldn’t hurt. He accepts and they arrange one for that afternoon.

Hopping on the subway, she wishes she had dressed a little more formally, in the vaguely antiquated style of witches and warlocks born of the Salem line. But didn’t she decide to leave all that behind when she left the coven, renouncing her birth right as the rising Supreme? Sure, Mallory likes to say that witchcraft simply interests her less these days than her new course of study in psychology, and if she needs to flex a fraction of her power to be able to afford an education at Columbia—enchanting small-time Lotto winnings, for example, or “speculating” on the stock market with a little harmless divination—then so be it.

The reasoning hardly adds up, however. If she is really as uninterested in witch culture as she imagines, why is she taking the cross-town train to see Michael Langdon, whose power outclasses that of every witch of his generation because it originates not in the ethereal realms but in the bowels of Hell?

Mallory knows his story all too well. The first few years of his “redemption arc” were spent at Miss Robichaux’s Academy, where he accepted Cordelia’s offer to help him find his humanity. But Mallory knew that whatever humanity those two had managed to discover wasn’t enough to keep Michael with the New Orleans coven for very long.

No, something went wrong between the Supreme and her little lost Antichrist, and it wasn’t just about her burning Ms. Mead at the stake. Mallory can relate—something also went wrong between her and the Supreme before Michael even arrived at the school. Is his “something” anything like her “something”? Only one way to find out.    

The building is nestled in leafy part of the expensive neighborhood where, under normal circumstances, Mallory wouldn’t be able to rent in her wildest dreams. She walks up the steps and hits the doorbell, half-expecting to hear sinister crowing or evil cackling to go with the darkness that emanates from within, even with Michael nowhere in sight. Velvety and tendril-like, that darkness reaches deep into her chest to wind around her rapidly beating heart. She wonders if this whole thing wasn’t a mistake.  

He buzzes her inside and she climbs the stairs to the second floor, where he stands at the door, holding it open like a gentleman.   

“Welcome, Mallory. May I offer you something to drink? Coffee? Tea?”

“I don’t suppose you have Louisiana swamp mud.”

She regrets even thinking it as soon as it leaves her lips, but he's smiling. The tension is broken.

“No, I’m afraid not. Come into the kitchen and I can show you what teas I do have.”

So this is the dreaded and feared Michael Langdon. Mallory takes in his appearance, scanning him head to toe. To say that he is beautiful would be a gross understatement. He is tall, with a well-muscled torso and perfectly proportioned everything. His hair is the color of the dying sun in the late afternoon, parted in the center and cascading in loose curls past his chin. It's the curls that make him resemble the painted angel he’s pretending to be. His nose is strong yet delicately sculpted, and his lips are full and inviting, with a crease on the bottom like a ripe peach. His eyes are the lightest cornflower blue yet have none of the fragility of petals. Their exact shape is impossible to describe, a true conundrum. Are they slanted up or slanted down? She’s never seen eyes that do both, until now.

As advertised, the apartment is clean and renovated. Mallory admires the space as she takes a sip from her tea, stepping over the Turkish carpets that cover the hardwood floor, running her fingers along the brocaded curtains that block most of the natural light. It is hardly surprising that Michael prefers the shadows.

There is a lot of heavy antique furniture, and a number of items that look like rejects from some kind of occult museum. A lumpen creature suspended in a jar of a greenish liquid. A voodoo doll made of rags, twigs and rope so impaled with pins that it resembles a porcupine. Another doll in a glass case, this one with a porcelain face cracked in half, whose eyes follow Mallory around the room.

She gasps when she sees how Michael has “decorated” a permanent corner of the living room. Two dozen knives made for every type of violence are stuck in the wall, angled in a way that suggests telekinesis. They spell out the letters “C. G.”

Michael motions for her to sit on the sofa while he plants himself in the armchair. He says nothing for a long time, as if making her uncomfortable were an end in itself.

“So,” Mallory finally mutters, clearing her throat. “Where do we start?”

“Let’s start with you telling me that you’re a witch, and a powerful one at that. I could smell it on you from across the street.” He closes his eyes and inhales as if her witch scent isn’t entirely displeasing.

So he intends to make her squirm. Two can play that game.

“Yes, Michael, I _am_ a witch. In the spirit of full disclosure, you could start by telling me that you’re the Antichrist.”

The smirk playing on his lips vanishes without a trace.

“Former Antichrist. No longer practicing,” he corrects her. “And wasn’t it obvious from how I wrote the ad? It’s hardly a secret.”

“Good, I’m glad we got that out of the way.” Mallory feels her confidence surging, now that she has ruffled his feathers. “You’re some kind of criminal investigator now, aren’t you? A consultant on crimes of a ‘suspicious’ nature is what the authorities call it.”

The arrogant grin is back. “And you, dear Mallory, are a student of psychology right here in the city, with an interest in psychoanalysis. Kleinian, I believe?”

She nearly chokes on her tea.

“How did you know that? Are you reading my mind?” This is the last thing she needs, especially not with her thoughts chugging along their usual perverted tracks, and right here in the home of her prospective roommate, a former Antichrist.

“Relax, Mallory. I looked you up online. Clairvoyance wasn’t a gift my Father thought to bestow upon me,” he sniffs, and looks at her so penetratingly that Mallory feels like a dead frog being dissected in science class. “Beyond the obvious facts that you are a cat lover, a violinist, have the rare gift of resurgence and, until a few years ago, were a student at Miss Robichaux’s Academy and a ward of Cordelia Goode, from whom you parted on less than pleasant terms, I know nothing about you whatsoever _._ ”  

“If you’re not clairvoyant, then explain to me how you deduced all that about me.”

“See? You’re already speaking my language.” He beams at her and gets up from his armchair to crouch at her feet. “The black cat hair on your sweater is the most obvious clue.”

He plucks a few cat hairs from her arm, and she remembers what Madison told her about his childhood offerings to his grandmother Constance—a string of skinned rodents and cats nailed to doorways and cupboards, then buried in the yard to nourish her overabundant rosebushes. Even if being Michael’s roommate would be interesting for Mallory, maybe it wouldn’t be so fun for her cat Circe.     

Wordlessly, he seeks her permission as he takes both her hands into his own, examining them under the scant light streaming in through the curtains. When skin touches skin, Mallory feels a jolt of electricity spread through her body.  

“That you’re a violinist is revealed by how short you keep your nails and by these little indentations on the pads of the fingers on your left hand, which is where you press down on the strings, not to mention the large callous on your right index finger where you grip the bow.”   

As he lets go off her hands and steps back to examine her whole person, Mallory feels a sudden emptiness and reaches for her teacup on instinct, but it doesn’t replace the lost warmth of his hands.

“As for the power of resurgence, the halo of luminosity around you suggests that you have dabbled with life-giving magic from an early age. You must have revived your fair share of mice, sparrows and other tiny creatures mauled by the cats you have owned for most of your life. The permanently haunted look in your eyes tells me that you yourself have died, probably violently. Going beyond the veil and coming back tends to change a person.”

Michael is right about all of it. But she doesn’t intend to let him know. It’s time to raise the stakes of this cat-and-mouse game.

“If you know so much about me, answer me this: why would I consent to sleep under the same roof as a psychopath?”

This throws Boy Wonder for a loop. Mallory likes the way he looks as his eyebrows knit together in concentration, trying to figure her out.  

“I’m not a high-functioning psychopath, Mallory. I’m a divinely prophesized hell-beast with seven heads and ten horns sent to destroy the world. Do your research.”

“I _have_ done my research, Michael. I know someone who went to the Murder House in LA.”

The look of concentration is replaced by a look of confusion. “Oh. What did they find out?”

“Lots of fascinating things.”

“For example?”

“That your grandmother committed suicide to get away from you. That your mother tried to stab you in your sleep with a carving knife. That you ate a virgin’s heart at a Black Mass.”

Michael winces at this last part and turns away abruptly, walking up to the window to push the curtains aside and survey the street. There is a mother pushing a stroller on the sidewalk and a gaggle of kids returning from school.  

“I did. But I’m no longer that person.”

Mallory’s blood begins to simmer in her veins without any warning. The foul creature is deliberately hiding his face so she can’t read his expression. “Really? And here I thought that murderers had to be punished for their crimes…”

When he whips around to face her, she is stunned to see tears glittering in his eyes. “Why did you come here, witch? You knocked on my door, not the other way around.”

“Maybe I wanted to see it for myself, the beast with seven heads and ten horns.”

“Like some kind of atrocity tourist,” he spits out in disgust, as if she's the one being judged. “What does that say about you?”

“That I’m a witch with a long memory and a short fuse.” She has no idea why she is being so hard on him, but it feels good enough that she continues to spit vitriol, like a woman possessed. “Where is that girl now, Michael? You could have resurrected her. Why didn’t you? Because her innocent blood still powers your spells?”  

Michael doesn’t swallow the bait. He looks calmer and more collected as he smooths down the front of his three-piece suit. When he lowers himself into the chair again, he doesn’t seem to be angry, only chastened. It is as if her unforgivably abusive tirade wasn’t unexpected, was even what he felt he deserved. Tears stain his burgundy tie.

“You’re an interesting person, Mallory. So intrigued by darkness, yet so quick to pass judgment. I agree that I should have received more of a punishment for my sins, even the most final punishment of all. I should be rotting in my own personal hell right now, if my Father even bothered to make one. But think for a minute. Deduce. What reason could Cordelia possibly have for letting me live? Assuming that she’s even capable of killing me.”

Mallory has pondered this question a number of times, and there is only one reason she can think of. It must be a kind of torture, she thinks, to be so hideous and unwanted that the most powerful beings on Earth only suffer your presence to avert an even bigger calamity.

“As long as you’re alive and stalking the earth, Satan can’t conceive another son.”

“Excellent! I’m rubbing off on you already.”

“But if you’re such a disappointment to Daddy Dearest, what’s stopping him from killing you so he can send a replacement?”

“Oh, just a little something called ‘free will,’” Michael replies. “Satan really wants me back on the warpath, but I have to choose to be different, and keep choosing, each and every day for the rest of my life.” His feline eyes narrow, gaze turning feral, predatory. “Even if all my instincts rebel against the stagnation of goodness.”

“Is that where I come in?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m not luminous myself, nothing like you, the conductor of blinding light. But with some patience and guidance, I should be able to keep my nose out of trouble.”

“You want me to be your conductor of light?”

“Something like that. Though I sense there is darkness in you, Mallory, or you wouldn’t be here.”

He bores into her with those mesmerising eyes of his, like he’s X-raying her soul, but she stares right back, not giving a proverbial inch. A ping from his phone breaks the enchantment, and she slumps on the cushions like a ragdoll. Michael gets up to look at the message and then walks around the sofa, leaning to whisper in her ear as he winds a lock of her hair around his thumb and forefinger. “You’ve passed the test. You’re the perfect roommate.”

“How great for you,” she mutters sarcastically, aghast at the size of his ego. And now he’s touching her without permission, too?

“You can move in tonight, though I won’t be here to assist.” Michael’s eyes are back on his phone as soon as he slips her the contract. “I’m wanted in Harlem. My favorite voodoo practitioner has been accused of a crime she didn’t commit.”

Mallory wonders what the hell she’s gotten herself into as she signs her name on the dotted line, thankfully not in blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was inspired by a number of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The title comes from the one where Holmes and Watson first meet. Holmes refers to Watson as his “conductor of light” in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes’s mind “rebels at stagnation” in The Sign of Four. Watson describes Holmes shooting the letters “V.R.” (for Victoria Regina) into the wall in “The Musgrave Ritual.” Here, C.G. stands for Cordelia Goode, who is a kind of queen. I loosely reference the string of deductions Holmes makes about a client in “The Norwood Builder” when Michael deduces things about Mallory from her appearance. The line about the high-functioning psychopath (should be sociopath) is from BBC’s Sherlock. In this fic, Watson is the violinist, not Holmes.


	2. Bound (Part 1 of 3)

Mallory bolts awake in the middle of the night, all her senses on high alert. Michael wasn’t kidding about the heat. Though the window is wide open, the room is an inferno, invaded by a creeping darkness that no streetlight can exorcise. Beads of sweat roll down her forehead as she sits up in bed, sheeting cling to her back and chest. How much worse must it feel for cat, with her shiny black fur?

“Circe?”

She feels around on the bed for the familiar ball of fuzz, but the animal isn’t there. 

_Fuck. Michael wouldn’t dare—_

Dancing before her eyes are visions of neighborhood pets skinned alive and strung up like Christmas decorations around the Murder House. She jumps off the mattress and runs down the hallway, nearly stumbling on an upturned corner of rug. If the Eldritch creature hurt her cat in any way, she would murder him on the spot, and it wouldn’t matter if another bigger, badder Antichrist were conceived tomorrow. 

When she gets to the living room, she gasps. Sitting in his usual armchair is her roommate, the picture of innocence as he looks up from his book, perfect profile illuminated by a single red lamp. Mallory’s cat is curled up in his lap, purring away like a jet engine as he strokes her back with the gentlest of touches.

“Morning, Mallory. I hope you slept well?”

“It’s four a.m.”

Michael looks confused for a split second before going back to his book like she’s not even in the room.

“Circe, let’s go back to bed.”

It’s not use calling her. Slow to trust strangers, Circe has already warmed to Michael, the living furnace, like he raised her from a kitten. Once the stubborn feline discovers a comfortable nook, no force in the world can get her to relocate. Mallory has no choice but to shrug her shoulders and plop herself on the purple velvet sofa.

A porcelain vase filled with the most decadent red roses she’s ever seen stands on the coffee table between them. She doesn’t remember seeing them before she went to bed.

“Did somebody bring these?”

“Our landlady. She wanted to meet my new roommate, but you were sleeping.”

“What kind of landlady visits her tenants in the middle of the night?”

“The kind that rents to the son of the devil.”

She leans forward to inhale the flowers’ peculiar aroma, seductively sweet with an edge of rot. Odd that no one bothered to de-thorn them.

“What are you reading?”

The title looks like it’s in Gaelic.

“Just a little book on clay bodies in medieval Scotland. Nothing terribly useful to my current case,” Michael replies, releasing a cloud of dust as he closes the ancient volume. He passes the book to Mallory who runs her fingers along the luxurious leather binding. Gaelic is a language she doesn’t read, but the gilded letters are beautiful and there is an illustration on the back made in dark blue ink, a skull with snakes coming out of its empty eye sockets and grinning mouth.  

_Wait, it can’t be—_

Mallory drops the book like it burned her fingers. The leather is  _tattooed_.

“Michael, this is bound in human skin.”

“Yes, it’s a fine example of anthropodermic bibliopegy. A forgotten art, in my humble opinion. Makes the recorded spells more potent.”

“It’s disgusting!”

She considers asking if he knows  _whose_ skin the book is bound with, but there’s no need.

“The hide belonged to a Scottish physician hanged in 1828 for, how do I put this delicately, _producing_  bodies for the anatomical theater when they ran out. Along with an accomplice, he murdered sixteen innocent people just so he could dissect them.” He looks vaguely impressed. “When a healer goes wrong, Mallory, they are the first of criminals. It confirms what I’ve always believed.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What do you believe?”

“That all people, if given the right pressures or stimulus, are evil motherfuckers.”

The dramatic way he says it makes her chuckle.

“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be trying to help them. You’re softer than you let on.”

Scoffing, Michael walks over to the mantelpiece and picks up a metal device, taking a long drag and expelling the vapor through his nostrils like a dragon.

“A few minutes ago, you thought I killed your cat.”

Mallory is ashamed about her earlier assumption, not least because the animal in question is following Michael around the room and rubbing herself on his leg a little shamelessly.

“Your ad said you’re a non-smoker.”

“I’m not smoking, I’m  _vaping_. This is an e-cigarette.”

“I know what it is, but you shouldn’t be doing either… You know what? Never mind. It’s way too early in the morning for any of this shit. Tell me about your case.”

Michael drops his façade of cool indifference and reminds her of a small boy, all wide-eyed enthusiasm and sun-kissed ringlets that bounce when he gets excited. She likes him this way, transformed by an eagerness to share all that is macabre and cruel about a world she sees through rose-colored glasses.

“Did you know that Harlem has a lively voodoo scene? Not quite on the same level as Louisiana, but getting there.”

“It sounds like you’re talking about restaurants,” she jokes, but it makes total sense. Magical cultures are all around in this new borough, and she itches to immerse herself in their reflected glow, ethereal or demonic, it doesn’t matter—that’s how much she misses her coven. Giving up the formal practice of magic was the hardest thing that Mallory ever did, and though it was necessary at the time, there is no substitute for the sense of magical unity in difference she found among her sisters.

Michael could never comprehend what she’s lost, even with his powers beyond comprehension. Satan’s son always walked alone, starved by his Father of love and acceptance. But if anyone alive or dead knows what it’s like to renounce your birth right because it frightens you half to death, it is the heir to chaos who refused to his throne as king of the ashes. 

“Mallory, are you even listening to me?” Ringed fingers wave in front of her face. “You look like you’re miles away. As I was saying, Dominique Aguillard doesn’t practice dark magic. Unlike our tattooed friend here—” he taps the Gaelic volume on clay bodies, “—she is a genuine healer who would never harm another living soul. By day, Dominique is a paediatric oncologist at the Harlem Hospital Center. By night, she helps her community with healing potions.”

“Then why did they arrest your friend?”

“I don’t have any friends. Dominique is an acquaintance.”

He puffs on his e-cig until no more vapor comes out, then returns to the mantel so he can rifle through the Persian slipper hung there on a string. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m all out of juice. This is a three-tank problem.”

Mallory rolls her eyes.

It’s five o’clock in the morning by the time they’re dressed and standing on 1st Avenue to hail a yellow cab. One practically screeches to a halt as soon as Michael raises his elegant hand, but Mallory gets in first. Sitting huddled in the backseat is more than a little strange. Though no parts of their bodies are touching, the infernal miasma he exudes from every pore envelops her in the confined space, stroking her nostrils like it’s the finest fragrance she’s ever smelled.

Swaddled in primordial darkness like she came out of its birthing canal herself, Mallory wonders: is there any sensation on earth worth burning in Hell for all eternity?

“Where to?” asks the gruff-voiced cabbie.

“NYPD 28th Precinct. Corner of Frederick Douglass and West 123rd Street.”

They drive in silence for a while, air between them crackling with tension, until Michael breaks the spell.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Depends on the question.”

“Why did you leave Miss Robichaux’s Academy?”

“Don’t you know the answer to that already?”

His smile is so smug that she fights the urge to punch him. It figures that the devil’s son would hear about a witch’s  _Descensum_ going horribly wrong. Where he comes from, that’s probably a cause for celebration.

“I know some of it. I want to hear the rest from your lips.”

Casting a sly glance at her mouth, Michael bites his bottom lip, as if _that_ could distract her, loosen her tongue enough for the whole story to spill out.

“What about you? You left Cordelia too.”

If Madison was to be believed, Michael had spent four days in the wilderness before finally knocking on their door—starved, dehydrated, hallucinating, filthy. He was damn lucky they let him at all, but as to why he left a few months later, no one could say.

“Your Supreme always had a  _generous_ streak,” he says now through gritted teeth, sarcasm lacing his lovely voice. “But that’s a long story for another day.”

The precinct is a concrete building with square windows. While Michael is not a welcome presence there exactly, he’s not quite the nuisance that Mallory expected. The two officers at the entrance direct them to the suspect waiting in the interrogation room. In the windowless cell sits a handsome woman in her forties with a kindly face and roaming, terrified eyes.

Dominique Aguillard already knows Michael, whom she greets in Creole-accented French before switching to English.

Damn it, Mallory thinks. How many languages does this man speak?

“Michel, _mon ange_ , I thank the Good Lord above you’re here,” cries the suspect. Even in her despair, she is considerate enough of his burning ears to avoid the dreaded “G” word. “But what can we do? She is too diabolical, too clever. She has no limits, no soul!”

“Calm yourself, doc. Take a deep breath.”  His stronger hands find her trembling ones across the table.

Mallory coughs to get his attention.

“Oh, and this is my friend and colleague, Mallory, who shares my love for all that is bizarre and outside the humdrum routine of everyday life,” he tells Dominique, presenting her like some exotic species of flower he’s cultivating in a hothouse.

While she isn’t sure about being called an assistant, if it means helping this innocent woman and others like her, so be it.

Dominique proceeds to explain how the police searched her car and discovered figurines made to look like the victims, with their hair pressed into the wax, woven into the textile, and braided into the rope. All five were rising socialites from the Upper East Side, enterprising young women from sleepy working-class towns who had come to New York with dollar signs in their eyes and married into mind-boggling wealth of the geriatric persuasion.

The sixth victim was found in her penthouse with a gash in her throat and a yapping toy poodle at her feet, blood spattered all over the gilded stucco and Louis Quinze furniture.

The worst part? Dominique was in the penthouse too, wielding a pair of gardening shears like Mrs Bellamy-Rutherford III was another topiary on the rooftop terrace.

Between heart-rending sobs, the good witch describes how horrific it felt as the essence of evil possessed her body and slashed the poor socialite to death.

“I could feel the burning anger that drove me to do the deed,” she explains. “But it wasn’t my anger, Michel, it was someone else’s. I had no control over anything. You must believe me.”

A dark shadow passes over his angelic features in that moment, contorting a look of empathy into stony regret. Of course he believes her; if anyone understands what it’s like to be deeply ashamed of the unspeakable violence you committed, it’s Michael. The difference is that he _meant_ to do it, probably enjoyed every wretched second of the experience, Mallory thinks as a montage of slashed throats, snapped necks, and living hearts bitten into like juicy apples plays before her eyes.

Was it a dissociative personality disorder? An act of euphoric self-affirmation? Or just Satan taking the wheel?

She could speculate forever but never know.

“What do you think, Michael? I’d say _Concilium_.”

Her partner shakes his head. 

“Dinah Stevens hasn’t mastered that particular art yet. It was most likely a powder.”

“What kind of powder do we know of that can compel a person to kill a stranger?”

“Something new and powerful.” He turns to the suspect, offering her an embroidered tissue from his breast pocket. “Do you remember coming into contact with any strange substances?”

Dominique doesn’t remember, but it could have been anything.

“Sit tight a few more days. You’ll be safe behind bars. Meanwhile, we’ll find a way to clear your name.”

“If only it were that simple,  _mon chéri_. My reputation is ruined, even if I go free. Now that everyone at the hospital knows I’m a witch, they have no use for that kind of healer. If only I was strong enough to bring that poor woman back to life…”

The sky is blushing with dawn as they drive home, snug in the backseat of another yellow cab. Michael is quiet and somber now, concentrating intensely on the case, and Mallory might as well be invisible. All this talk about crime has made her uneasy. Will she regret her decision to live with such a tormented soul?  

“If you know who framed Dominique, why don’t you tell the police so they can arrest the real culprit?”

“Because Dinah Stevens always covers her tracks, especially when there’s cold, hard cash to be made. We’re dealing with a person who doesn’t see good or evil, black or white. Only green.”

“She sounds delightful.”

“One of the most charming people I have ever met. But we can’t approach her directly. We must go through someone she least suspects.”

“And who is that?”

A mischievous look crosses Michael’s face, chasing away the storm cloud of concentration. He breaks out into an unexpected giggle.

“Her son.”

 

*****

Next morning, Mallory is falling asleep in her lecture on psychoanalysis as her professor drones endlessly about the Freudian pleasure principle, when a familiar flaxen head appears through the door of her classroom. Speak of the devil (or almost). He looks every inch the fallen angel in an expertly tailored black suit and halo of cascading curls and—

 _Is he wearing eyeliner_? 

Rimmed in charcoal, Michael’s eyes are more icy-blue than ever as he mentally dissecting any fellow student who approaches Mallory while she gathers her books and laptop.

 _You’d make a nice outfit for my grimoire_ , she can practically hear him thinking.

“What’s so urgent that it couldn’t wait until I got home?”

“I hope you’re an art lover, Mallory, because we’re going to a gallery.”

It’s a brand new day and he’s in an excellent mood. In no time at all, their cab drops them off in Chelsea, before an expensive-looking gallery whose exterior is a concrete mausoleum and interior a sterile white cube.

Inside, Mallory gapes at the metallic paintings hung sparsely on the walls. Upon closer inspection, these aren’t paintings at all but massive warped mirrors that deform her image like a carnival attraction.  

She glances over at Michael to gauge his reaction, but there _is_ no reaction. Boy Wonder just stares blankly around the room, hands behind his back. What does he see in those distorted reflections? Probably the same avatar of monstrosity that stares back at him in the flattest, truest mirror.

“You’re too good-looking to be the reviewer from _Artforum_ ,” a seductive voice intones behind them.

A beautiful man with closely cropped facial hair is playing with the diamond skull ring on his pinkie as he looks Michael up and down like he just stepped off a canvas by Cabanel.

“You’re right,” he replies in a tone so cold that Mallory half-expects to see icicles forming on his shapely lips. “I’m here to talk about your mother. And you don’t even have to pay me.”

“Gorgeous _and_ funny,” says the art impresario, circling his prey with renewed interest. “I really hope you’re comparing yourself to my psychiatrist because this space _never_ has to pay for press. I can’t help that every show we do is earth-shatteringly wonderful. I’m Andre Stevens, by the way.” He extends a gloved hand to Michael, who doesn’t even dream of returning the handshake.   

“Tell me, how does a 22-year old gallerist who has been in business for less a year come to represent a global superstar like Jeff Koons? No offense, Mr. Stevens, but Gagosian was a much better fit than little, young, inexperienced _you_.”

“How rude.” Andre clutches his paisley-printed tie, looking genuinely hurt. “Besides, these aren’t Koonses, they’re—”

“I know what they are.” Michael keeps him wriggling on the metaphorical hook. “Can you look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t aware that a saintly doctor is rotting in jail as we speak, and all because Dinah Stevens needed a scapegoat for her sins?”

Andre shakes his head, claiming to know nothing, which could well be true—that is, until Michael utters the magic word that changes his whole demeanor from studied innocence to raw panic.

“Stu? What do you know about Stu?”

“Not much. Only that he didn’t run off to the Caribbean with his Pilates instructor, like your mother told you.”

Andre looks like he’s going to retch, but Michael’s on a roll. Something like childish delight flickers behind those striking turquoise eyes, as if unravelling the spool of lies that maintains this man’s sanity is the most fun he’s had all week.

“Prove it, and I’ll help you put away that heartless bitch for good.”

“That’s a simple matter. Your mother recently acquired an old spell book, which she rebound in new leather. Give me access to her study and I’ll show you all the proof you’ll ever need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock Holmes refers to a particularly hard case as “a three-pipe problem” in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Holmes smokes and keeps his tobacco is a Persian slipper (revealed in “The Musgrave Ritual”). Michael vapes, so it becomes a three-tank problem. At one point I adapt the line, “when a doctor does goes wrong, he is the first of criminals” from “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” In that story, the murderer is a physician, but here it’s the innocent suspect. The body snatchers are real (see the Burke and Hare murders in 1828), and so is the practice of binding books in human skin. The line about Mallory sharing Michael’s “love for all that is bizarre and outside the humdrum routine of everyday life” is from “The Red-Headed League” but also the TV series Elementary, where Watson is played by Lucy Liu. 
> 
> Next chapter, I’m showing a more animalistic side of Michael (but it won’t be his fault exactly, and nothing bad will happen). Just a forewarning. Ultimately, this is a slow-burn romance.


	3. Bound (Part 2 of 3)

It’s night when she returns home from class. For some reason, the whole block has gone dark.

_Michael._

It can’t be coincidence that the power outage is centered on their brownstone. There is no light anywhere on their street, not even the weak glow of flashlights and candles. Mallory slips past her neighbors and stumbles in the corridor before her nose collides with the front door. Her fingers tremble as she turns the key in the lock, her only thought for her roommate.

Michael has spent the past week playing cat-and-mouse with Dinah Stevens, the real culprit behind the socialite murders pinned on Dominique Aguillard. Once Andre Stevens discovered what really happened to his boyfriend Stu—a boyfriend his mother had always insisted was using him for his money and art-world connections—he kept his promise and showed them the study where Dinah kept a few incriminating items, including the spell book bound in “exotic” leather.

It wasn’t enough. If their goal is to clear Dominique’s name, they need a confession from Dinah _and_ concrete evidence of her crimes, preferably a sample of the powder she used to turn the good doctor into an unwitting killer.

The problem? There is no sign of the witch anywhere. Right before the murders hit the headlines, Dinah left them all twisting in the wind, probably running off to some international hidey-hole they have no hope of finding in a million years.

_Where are you?_

The darkness that fills their shared apartment is an oppressive, enveloping presence. Mallory pretends to be some variety of mole, a subterranean animal never meant to have eyes, as she feels her way to the living room. There, the curtains are drawn to block out even the moon’s reflected shine, and nothing stirs, not even her cat Circe.

The window is open so the cat must have slipped out at the first sign of trouble.  Or so she hopes.

No, she refuses to suspect Michael of harming her, not after being proven so wrong about that last time. But something isn’t quite right here, and she can’t pinpoint why. The tables have turned. The balance of power has never been less in her favor.

She strikes an imaginary match to kindle an orb-like flame in her palm. But the magic dies in an instant. By the time it finally occurs to her to panic, she is unable to move, frozen in place by something unseen.

“Michael?” Her voice is no louder than a whisper as a force contracts around her throat, removing her ability to scream but not to speak. “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.”

Circling soundlessly, he is a jungle cat in stealth mode, ready to pounce on a wounded doe.

“That’s funny because I can see _you_.”

She swallows. Her roommate is rightly proud of his high-powered perception, and likes to brag about something he calls “night vision of the soul.” Now it’s revealed he has _actual_ night vision.

“Why is the power out? Did something happen? What can I do to help?”

The helpful roommate—that’s the role she decides to play as she appeals to the better angel of his rationality, or what little remains of it. If she had a barometer for evil, the water level would be spiking right about now, pressure dropping to warn of the oncoming storm.

“You’ve helped so much already, my dear _assistant_.”

His voice is deeper and more threatening than she remembers—the very definition of _not okay_. Any fool can see that the magic is potent enough to tear through his strongest defenses and bring out that part of his personality he is desperate to repress for the good of humanity.

“It’s obvious what happened, Michael. You came in contact with Dinah’s mind-control powder.”

There is a long silence before he replies: “It wasn’t Dinah.”

Mallory feels more confused than ever. If they were wrong about Dinah framing Dominique, then someone framed Dinah, but who could that be?

“It’s irrelevant now. I had to open the canister in order to destroy it.”

“Did you?”

Another silence.

“Yes. But it opened my eyes… Do you want to see what I see?”

“No,” she answers as calmly as her hammering heart will allow. “Before you take complete leave of your senses and do something you _really_ regret, I need you to turn the lights back on.”

Eyes still useless, feet still rooted in place, arms still pinned to her sides, the only weapon she has is her voice, if she can only get through to the _real_ Michael beneath whatever is controlling his mind, fanning the flames of his worst impulses.

“Why? The light is so overrated. Isn’t it so much nicer to talk in the dark?”

He transmutes across the room to materialize a few feet away.

“You know, Mallory, the last year of my life has been such a waste. My mind has been racing like an engine, tearing itself to pieces because it’s disconnected from the work for which it was built. All that ends today.”

He is standing behind her now, breathing hotly on the exposed nape of her neck. She wracks her brains but comes up with nothing to say as she’s stalling for time.

“What are you going to do?”

“What I should have done the night you moved in…"

With unbearable slowness, a finger slides up the sweaty skin from the edge of her collar to the soft underside of her jaw, raising goose bumps in its wake.

“…Put you in your place. Establish some hierarchy around here.”

Next thing she knows, a hot tongue is swiping along her earlobe and around the shell of her ear, and the sensation is so immediate that she tips her head backwards without meaning to, exposing more of her neck. A fire kindles in her belly as he takes the offering. Heat spreads lower and lower, coaxing arousal onto her panties until she is so humiliated she doesn’t know if to laugh or cry in the face of her would-be assailant.

“If you do this, Michael, there’s no coming back from it,” she whispers with some difficulty, shocked that her body is responding to his touches with something other than shame and fear. “This isn’t who you are, not anymore…”

He laughs, and for a split second the sound multiplies in his throat, like he’s no longer one entity but several. A gaggle of demons? She knows about the murder of crows and the conspiracy of ravens.

“This is _exactly_ who I am, or was, before you witches came along and fucked everything up.”

Telekinetic hold never slackening, he lifts her into the air and floats her down the hallway in the direction of his bedroom. Tears roll down her cheeks as the door opens and she lands on the mattress with an unceremonious thud. Metal restraints fly out of nowhere to attach around her wrists and ankles, drawing her limbs into the uncomfortable shape of a star. He picks that moment to light all the candles in the room, and the sight is so terrible to behold that she misses the shelter of darkness.

Wilder than she’s ever seen it, his hair frames his face like a deceptive halo, blown back by some invisible power.

His skin is paler than usual, nearly white as it accentuates the grey rings around his eyes, creating the impression that he hasn’t slept in a decade.

His generous lips are slightly parted as he inhales and exhales quick little breaths, as if winded by the vision of her manacled to the bedposts and struggling in her restraints.

His eyes—

Dear Lord in Heaven above, Mallory can’t even look at his eyes. Heavy-lidded and blue like the hottest part of the flame, they rake over her spread-eagled form in a confusion of lust, hurt, pride and insatiable desire for control.

“Under normal circumstances, I might be… amenable to exploring this kind of contact… once we get to know each other better—”

“You keep saying that word. _Normal._ But you and I are nothing like normal, Mallory. Why pretend to be?” He is sitting on the edge of the bed now, surveilling the territory of her body, martialling his forces for some kind of maneuver.

“Michael, I’m asking you, begging you, for the last time, to stop…”

She’s sick. She’s cursed. She’s lost! There is a mutiny in her flesh, or: her libido is staging a coup, pushing her mind overboard before it has a chance to react. In no time at all, clever fingers are undoing the first three buttons on her shirt, but Michael is too impatient to bother with the rest, and so he shreds the shirt into ribbons with a flick of the wrist, sending buttons flying across the room; he does the same to her ratty sports bra until nothing hides her nakedness from his burning gaze.

_Fuck._

She should be more terrified than she is, and it’s no good at all that her brain is screaming bloody murder while her body rolls out the red carpet for the man who put her in this humiliating position.  With agonizing slowness, Michael traces a line from her collarbone to her stomach and circles around the edge of her breasts, avoiding the more sensitive parts of her, as if in mock-deference to her modesty.

As painfully aroused as she is, Mallory has a moment of lucidity and remembers one final line of appeal she could try. It’s risky, but there’s nothing to lose.

“Is this payback?”

Curious, he stops undoing his belt.

“For what?”

The worst thing is his eyes, which are pitch black instead of blue, sclera completely gone. She is startled by the coiled violence she sees there, the total absence of anything resembling humanity.

“For the way Cordelia treated you when you came to her for help.”

What if it’s more than just the powder affecting him? What if this is the real Michael? What if the other, kinder, more rational Michael is a projected image, an experiment in virtue bound to fail at any moment?

Now that moment has come. The silence is deafening. The tension is so thick you could slice it with a knife. All the shadows in the room grow longer, sharper. All the candles flicker before going out.

Plunged back into darkness, Mallory braces for a show of brute force, or worse, yet nothing happens. Instead, the mattress shifts with his departing weight as the malevolence in him grows weaker and weaker, retreating to that hidden place he normally keeps it. The metal restraints around her ankles and wrists dissolve into nothing, setting her free.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, his voice unexpectedly small. “I didn’t know that was inside of me.”

As Mallory pulls a sheet over her nakedness, she can’t help but feel like a cat’s toy, batted around like a ball of string. Sooner or later, the cat _will_ tire of playing and make her his meal. And yet some type of victory has been won here, that much is clear, and if she needs to be crueler than kind to cement that victory and restore Michael to some semblance of reason, then so be it.

“Cordelia punished you,” she taunts, going off rumors and suspicions, nothing concrete. “Made you submit when you were at your most vulnerable.”

She must have hit upon some sliver of truth because Michael lingers at the door, his voice leached of its earlier promise of terror and desire.

“My advice is to run, Mallory, run while you still can. I can’t hold him off too much longer.”   

Her first impulse is to stay and comfort him as he rides out the influence of the substance, but he implores her to leave, warning that the malevolence could return, that it’s not truly gone, that he is never in total control.

Mallory dresses herself with a heavy heart and gathers a few bare essentials from her room, stumbling back through the night until she reaches the illuminated part of the neighborhood where life continues as normal. She feels guilty about what happened on the whole subway ride uptown, where she spends the night in a dorm with some college friends who ask way too many questions about her new living arrangements.

When she returns to the brownstone next morning, Michael is gone. He doesn’t respond to her many calls and messages for the next 48 hours, and she spends the whole weekend in a daze, wondering if the self-loathing he undoubtedly feels after his foiled attack will drive him to do something truly rash.

Monday comes and goes, and so does Tuesday, and Wednesday. Finally, on Thursday afternoon, her phone pings with a message from an unknown number:

 

**Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt**

**1 W 72nd St**

**Apt 42**

 

The address is one she recognizes—the building where the socialite was killed by Dominique, or the evil force piloting her body—but the name is unknown to her. It must be a neighbor with information that could exonerate the suspect.

She takes the A train to the Dakota, which greets her in all its huffy, ornamented glory. It resembles a Renaissance fortress with its countless balconies, niches and gables, looking out onto Central Park like the grand duchess of the Upper West Side. She resorts to _Concilium_ to sneak in, hoping to pass undetected by the ritzy neighbors on her way to apartment 42, and dearly hoping that this “Coco” person is home on a weekday.

She’s in luck. No sooner than she hears the doorbell chime, a blonde woman opens the door and invites her inside like she’s known her for years.

“Hi, I’m Coco. And you must be Mallory. Your partner said you would come to talk about the murder.” 

“You’ve seen Michael? Is he here?” Desperation colors her voice as she looks around the resplendent apartment, half-blinded by the silver color scheme with liberal touches of millennial pink. Michael is nowhere to be seen.

“Before we start, let me get a little something off my chest.” The heiress winks conspiratorially as she guides Mallory to pink sofa and shoves a bright yellow drink in her hand. “Here, have a mimosa.”

Once both women are seated, the one named Coco can barely contain her excitement.

“I’m a witch! And so are you, Michael said.”

“Oh.” Mallory almost chokes on her drink. She thought she felt the lightest of ethereal tendrils reaching out to her own magic through the air, but she wasn’t totally sure. It’s hard to know what power feels like when it’s isolated in one carrier, and a comparatively weak one like Coco, rather than vibrating all around like at the academy, where every woman is an Aeolian wind harp. 

“All my life, I’ve wanted a sister,” she practically yelps like the toy dog she probably owns. “And now I finally have one!”

“If you go down to New Orleans, there is a whole coven ready to welcome you.”

“I know! I’m going next month. My dad donated a zillion dollars to that school.” She walks over to side table piled with expensive-looking knick-knacks and unopened books on architecture, and picks up a wide-brimmed black hat trimmed with an ostrich feather. “What do you think? I have to look the part, right?”

When Mallory looks less than impressed, Coco settles down to tell her story. 

“Okay, so here’s the tea. I discovered my powers, pathetic as they are, when I went to Dean & DeLuca with my brother. They had these cute little samples of biscotti, so Trevor went to eat one and then I started tingling and feeling weird.”

“Let me guess. Your brother had celiac disease?”

“Wow, you’re good,” Coco marvels. “Just like Michael said you’d be. Anyway, so I smacked the biscotti out of his hand and basically saved his life. Word of my so-called superpower spread up and down the Upper East Side after that, and fancy ladies with irritated bowels showed up in droves, holding up snacks and baked goods, just begging me to help them so they could lose that last ten pounds once and for all.”

“Did you?”

“I tried, but those bitches don’t really want to know what’s in the food they shove down their throats. Suddenly, I was getting all kinds of readings: calories, sugar, sodium, saturated fat, good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, the whole she-bang.” Brown eyes widen for dramatic effect. “I’m not just a glorified gluten detector, Mallory. I’m a glorified nutrition label and now—” she grabs a bedazzled inhaler out of her Kelly bag and draws a slow, deep breath, “—it’s progressed to clothes and accessories.”

Huh? Those don’t have nutritional content.

“But they _do_ have labels. God, listen to me. I’m such a point-one-percenter cliché, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Mallory tries hard to be polite as Coco chatters on, but she’s impatient to know how this factors into the crime and, most importantly, how she met Michael.

“What does it have to do with the murder of Mrs Bellamy-Rutherford III in the penthouse?

“I’m getting there. About a week before the murder, I got into the elevator with one of my neighbors, let’s call her Mrs. H, and noticed that she was carrying a Niloticus Crocodile Himalaya Birkin that—” she closes her eyes, as if bracing for tragedy, “—wasn’t a Niloticus Crocodile Himalaya Birkin.”

“Oh?” Mallory is confused for a moment. “A knock-off?”

The other witch nods with a pained expression. “Mrs. H, bless her soul, comes from very old money, like, the oldest, came-over-on-the-Mayflower kind. But sometimes that kind of money is mismanaged, lost to bad investments like Theranos and the cryptocurrency bubble. Anyway, on several occasions I overheard this lady talking shit about all the ‘trashy gold-diggers’ marrying ‘our’ men and moving into ‘our’ neighborhood, and Mrs Bellamy-Rutherford, aka Tammy Labelle before her marriage, may God rest her soul, was as trashy as they come.”

“You think Mrs. H is behind her murder? But there’s no evidence.”

“Look, sis, I never asked to be a divinator extraordinaire. Personally, I would much rather start fires or move objects with my mind. However, the tingling, once it starts, is never wrong.” She points to her gut and rolls her eyes back into her head, making a weird gurgling noise like a woman possessed. “I know what I know, in here.”

Mallory chooses to believe her, but she will have to investigate. “You can sense danger. That’s a great power to have, especially now. I’ll tell you what I know. A spell was used to infuse a normally harmless powder with mind-control properties and turn a normally gentle woman into a killer. Voodoo dolls were fashioned of the other victims that were then planted in the same woman’s car. We thought we knew the witch who did it, but it turned out to be someone else, maybe Michael knows who." 

Coco looks hopeful. “I have no idea who’s behind the witchcraft, but I do have a feeling there’s more ‘old money’ involved, like a First Wives Club of the antediluvian persuasion, if you will. And I think I can prove it. There’s a DAR meeting tomorrow in Martha’s Vineyard…”

They make plans to go together first thing in the morning. It’s what Michael would want.

Before she leaves Coco, Mallory has one final question.

“How did you meet Michael?”

The heiress giggles, like it’s a funny story. “I was walking home from a fundraiser at the Met on Tuesday night, wearing a brutal new pair of stilettos, when I tripped over a grate and nearly sprained my ankle. This beautiful blonde man with the most mesmerising blue eyes appeared out of nowhere to help me up. A real snack, if you know what I mean, though kind of rough around the edges, with unwashed hair and a five-o’-clock shadow. As I was thanking him for his kindness, I couldn’t help but notice he was carrying a case, like for a stringed instrument of some type, and that whatever was in that case was worth, drumroll please: $16 million. The tingling told me that. Then we got to talking.”

Mallory rejoices at the news that Michael was spotted alive and in one piece, though she suspected as much from his text, but she immediately worries about Coco’s description of him looking wild-haired and unkempt, wandering the streets with—what exactly?

 _Oh._    

_He didn’t._

_He couldn’t._

Back on the street, she texts the following to the unknown number:

 

**Michael, where are you?**

**Why aren’t you answering?**

**I’m not mad at you.**

**I forgive you.**

**It wasn’t your fault.**

**Please don’t blame yourself.**

 

When she receives no reply for what feels like hours but is only minutes in reality, she fires off another quick burst of texts:

 

**I’m heading home now.**

**I met with Coco.**

**She told me she met you on the street, carrying a case.**

**Is it what I think it is?**

 

This time the phone rings within seconds, and when she picks up his voice sounds garbled like he’s speaking through a hurricane in the middle of a warzone at the bottom of the ocean.

“A gift. I wanted to apologize, but what I did was unforgivable…”

“You know I can’t accept it. I don’t even understand where you got it. A violin like that hasn’t been on the market in years.”

She imagines the reddish-golden shine of the varnished wood, with spruce on the front and maple on the back, and the sound holes that curl upwards in that particular way, like the ends of a smile.

“When I couldn’t locate a real one in this realm, I descended to his workshop and ordered him to make a new one.”

“Wait. Stradivarius is in Hell?”

“Where do you think talent like that comes from? Your god could never.”

From the way his voice scrapes and falters on the other line, she pictures him dirty and unshaven, hungry and tired, clothes ruined by a combination of caked dirt and dried blood, hopefully someone else’s rather than his own. She hopes he didn’t stay in Hell for too long, as he’s not particularly welcome there.

“Michael, come home. I’ll draw you a bath.”

He says nothing for a while, and she listens to the mysterious storm raging on the other end of the line, sounding like thrashing trees and clanging bells and whistling wind and churning metal and—

“That would be nice.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The crime scene is at The Dakota Apartments, the building where John Lennon was killed and whose façade appears in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. The line about Michael’s mind racing like an engine, tearing itself to pieces, is something Holmes says in “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Holmes has a Stradivarius in ACD canon, and here Mallory gets a newly commissioned one straight from Hell. 
> 
> Apologies to anyone reading my other story for not updating in a while. The eighth chapter is almost done and I’m updating ASAP. Thank you for reading, as always.


	4. Bound (Part 3 of 3)

Mallory is so used to seeing him groomed to perfection and dressed in expensive suits and ties that she barely recognizes the man who comes limping through the door at half past midnight. Filthy and unshaven, he’s in worse shape than she thought, a feral shadow of his usually elegant self.

“Let’s get you cleaned up first,” she orders, taking the priceless violin away when he asks her to play the Mendelssohn. “How long has it been since you ate?

He doesn’t remember.

“I’ve put some soup on the stove and bread in the oven. In the meantime, you need to re-hydrate.”

He takes the glass of water she offers with shaky hands and she helps him out of his ruined clothes.

Barely hanging together at the seams, his black Gucci jacket looks like the casualty of an ill-advised walking tour of the Serengeti, while the black shirt beneath isn’t much better. There is mud on his pants and blood in his hair, whether his own or someone else’s.

“Can’t heal yourself?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not strong enough.”

“Allow me.” 

She hovers her hands over the broken skin and watches it close up as healing energy radiates from her fingertips.

He really _has_ been to Hell and back.

Normally, it would be awkward for Mallory to see Michael half-dressed, but today it’s different; today she’s distracted by all the bruises on his chest and back, and the musculature rippling too close under the creamy skin.

“Jesus, Michael, you’re all skin and bones.”

He grimaces in pain and she can’t be sure if it’s the dreaded “J” word or the ethereal magic she worked to heal him. 

“Sorry! How’s that feel?”

“Much better,” he replies with a weary but grateful smile.

If his cheekbones and jawline were chiselled before, there’s a leaner and more haunted look to his face now, the result of losing ten pounds in less than a week. And that’s just the physical changes. Mallory can’t help but notice how intensely ashamed he still looks about what happened in this apartment a few days ago, how he won’t meet her gaze when she says that the creature who attacked her wasn’t him.

No, Michael insists, it _was_ him, the monster he was always meant to be. And he’s being difficult in other ways too, like when she questions him about the injuries and he won’t tell her how we got them and where he’s been.

The only saving grace is that he lets her fuss over his physical needs. In fact, he invites it. Michael is normally so masterful, so in control of his environment and everyone in it, that it’s jarring to see him acting so oddly obedient.

He follows Mallory to the bathroom without protest and patiently waits as she fills the tub with hot water and checks on the temperature. Tomorrow he’ll be back to being an ungovernable, unholy terror, but today he needs her to make the smallest decision.

Pouring in the lavender liquid to start the bubbles, she goes into the kitchen while the room fills with a fragrant steam. By the time she comes back her friend has stripped off the rest of his clothes and left them in a messy pile on the floor, and is standing on the tiles in bare feet with only a towel wrapped around his waist.

Looking a little sheepish, he tells her to close her eyes so he can get in the tub. When she reopens them, the towel is gone and the bubbles reach up to his neck, and then he’s disappearing under the water, staying under for a longer time than strictly necessary. 

“Michael, you’re going to drown yourself if you’re not careful,” she chastises once his smiling head re-emerges from the bubbles.

Silly Mallory, assuming he _can_ drown. Maybe he doesn’t even need to breathe, but only pretends to. Or maybe there are gills tucked behind his ears along with the Mark of the Beast.

In any case, Michael seems content to just sit in the bubbles, as if all the stubborn dirt and caked blood will melt away on its own. He’ll need to start scrubbing sooner or later, and Mallory wonders if she should offer to wash his hair, or if that would be stepping over an invisible boundary, the difference between roommates and something more.

He’s half asleep by the time she makes a decision. Grabbing a bottle of her favorite shampoo, she pours a dollop on her hand and sits on the edge of the tub, careful not to touch any other part of him but his head.

His eyes are still closed—still avoiding the terrifying prospect of meeting hers—when she starts to work the lather into his wet locks.

At first he’s enjoying the skin-on-skin contact, and humming a weird little tune as she massages it into his scalp, but his hair is such a mess that he starts to whine as soon as she begins untangling the knots.

“Be patient, I almost got them all,” she hushes his pained little cries. Dirt and blood dissolve under her fingers as she works, and finally, after many more childish complaints, his locks are looking shiny and clean again, smooth and silky like a baby's.

She uses a harsher tone to remind him to wash those parts of his body that she can’t reach—or won’t touch—and this time he picks up the sponge right away, before she even leaves the room. Outside the door, she lingers a moment until she hears the tub draining and shower running to blast away the last of the blood and grime.

When he’s done and dried off, she passes him a fluffy pink bathrobe through a crack in the door, apologizing for the snug fit and girly color. But it's better than rummaging in his closet. Who knows what she'd find there.

Soon he’s dressed and "decent" for company so she can join him in the bathroom. He's rubbed a small window into the foggy mirror, entranced by the strange man who stares back.

“I still look like a wild beast.”

He really does, Mallory thinks. In the best way possible.

The stubble adorning his jawline is a darker shade than the blonde on his head, and she wonders, briefly, ever so briefly, how it would feel against her softer skin, rubbing on her cheek or some other body part, lower down—

_No._

_Snap out it._

The mere whisper of intimacy would ruin the crime-fighting partnership they established the moment she moved in, not to mention the tenuous yet genuine friendship that has developed between them since then. The complication of Michael’s struggle with darkness makes the whole thing even more ridiculous to contemplate.

No, it’s unthinkable. If she's going to be his conductor of light, Mallory needs to pure of mind and pure of spirit, not distracted by carnal desires.

Tired of looking like a wild beast, Michael is eyeing the razor in the cabinet, but Mallory snatches it first out of fear that he’ll cut himself with his unsteady hand, and begins spreading the shaving cream over his cheeks and chin. He tenses up as she runs the blade under his jawline, scraping over the vulnerable skin that covers his jugular. A surge of power comes with the realization that she holds his life in her hands—hands that tremble slightly as the razor glides over the elegant planes of his face, leaving it boyishly smooth.

She could get used to this, Mallory thinks, both the giving of care and the wielding of power—and judging by how he shivers as she runs an exploratory finger along the newly shaved skin, on the pretext of catching the last of the foam, he’s enjoying it too.

“Mallory, stop…”

He’s wise to her game.

“I’m not doing anything,” she lies and begins to withdraw, but he catches her hand at lightning speed. His eyes fly open, and she’s caught in that irradiating azure, trapped by the weight of her guilt.

His voice sounds small and broken when he finally speaks. “It’s not that I don’t want this. It’s that I can’t. I’m incapable.”

Incapable of what, she wants to ask, but he’s not done yet.

“I didn’t see him, but I felt him, all around me. Like a fog, a darkness, the total absence of hope…”

She knows exactly who he’s talking about. It’s not for nothing that all those who enter Hell must abandon hope at the door.

“My Father sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows every quiver of each one of them. He does very little himself. He only plans, enticing men and women to dirty deeds.” He seizes her forearm in a vice-like grip, his uncut fingernails digging into her skin. “He’s planning something on Earth, and I’m too weak to fight him.”

“You’re not weak, Michael. Why don’t you ever believe me?” Throwing caution to the wind, she rubs circles of comfort through the terrycloth on his back. “He can’t reach you as long as you’re here, fighting his influence.” 

He releases her and puts his head in his hands. The universal gesture of hopelessness. How long he can resist the magnetic pull of that primordial evil is anyone’s guess, but Mallory hopes that, with the right guidance, he can fight whatever Lucifer decides to throw his way, in his infinite malice.

Michael nods like he wants to believe it too, and follows her to the kitchen, where she has spread a mini-feast on the table. Despite his anxiety, he proceeds to stuff himself silly, slowing down only when she threatens to take it away.

Later, when the meal is done and he’s out of the terrycloth and wearing a pair of flannel pajamas still warm from the drier, he begs her to stay after she tucks him in bed and turns off the light.

What a bizarre request.

Aren’t they being Platonic? And wasn’t Michael just telling her about how dangerous he was, how volatile, how foolish it was for her to be near him after recent events? His Father is still on the prowl, alert to any tremor of evil in his gigantic spider’s web, and his Satanic agents are dispersed all around the world, ready to re-start the Apocalypse and tempt Michael back onto the path of destruction.

It’s pure madness to indulge him, Mallory knows, and yet it’s so hard to say no when there’s nothing but innocence in those unnatural blues, a sincere need to not be alone.

She does the only thing she _can_ do.

Finding the least sexy pajamas she owns, a ratty cotton number covered with leaping frogs that hangs loose off her body, she dresses and crawls under the covers with her back to Michael. To his credit, he’s careful not to startle her out of his bed as he throws an arm over her back, keeping the more dangerous parts of him tucked away, his skin literally scorching through the double layer of fabric.

Exhausted beyond any human measure, Michael falls sleep in a matter of seconds, but it takes Mallory much longer. When she finally drifts off, her dreams are full of terrifying visions straight from the last book of the Bible.

Well, not just the Bible.

What makes it that much more humiliating when she awakens to the feel of soaked panties is the feel of Michael’s arms still around her, encircling her waist like territorial snakes.

Blushing in the dark, she remembers her copy of Krafft-Ebbing’s _Psychopathia Sexualis_ _,_ which is sitting on her desk, waiting to be read for Wednesday’s class on the cultural history of sex.

Now that Michael is sleeping soundly, it might be a good time to sneak out of his bed and return to her room, so there’s no awkwardness in the morning…

Bad idea.

The second she makes a move to leave the bed, he tightens his embrace and she’s hit with a new wave of heat, making her wish all over again that the ground would open up and swallow her whole.

Who knows? Maybe Hell is exactly where she belongs.

***** 

Late next morning, Michael looks furious when she tells him that she let Coco go alone to the DAR retreat in Martha’s Vineyard.

“You were sleeping the sleep of the dead! What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave you.”

“I’m feeling much better now, thank you.”

He certainly looks it. Clean-shaven and immaculately groomed, blonde waves shining and parted in the exact middle, Michael is back to his old self. Gone is the emotional conflict from last night too, the vulnerability and almost childlike need to be held.

“If you _had_ woken me up, we could have been there by now! Pack a small bag and look up the next flight to Vineyard Haven. Let’s hope we’re not too late.”

She does what he says, and in record time they’re cutting through the jungle of traffic and pulling up at La Guardia to board a tiny plane to the leafy enclave of the uber-rich, as far removed from the dirty hustle and bustle of the city as Heaven is from Hell.

Michael takes the aisle seat. Mallory is amused to learn this isn’t a preference but a strict requirement.

An aura of darkness radiates out from him and spreads through the whole plane, manifesting as a terrible mood that is highly contagious. He hates flying so much that Mallory worries about the mental state of the other passengers, not to mention the pilots and crew.

“It’ll be okay. You’ll see. They wouldn’t dare touch her in broad daylight.”

He grunts in reply. She looks out the window; they’re somewhere over the Atlantic. A few minutes pass before land appears on the horizon, and soon they’re flying over verdant golf courses, sapphire swimming pools, palatial summer homes, and other landmarks of great and irresponsible wealth.

Michael’s mood only worsens.

“It’s my belief, Mallory, founded upon my experience, that the most dangerous parts of New York present a lesser record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. These people think they own the world. Others only exist to serve their needs and stoke their egos.”

“Huh. Who knew the Antichrist was a Marxist.”

He shifts in his seat. “I’m not, and could you say that any louder?”

“Which part? One will get you thrown out the airlock. The other will have you signing autographs until we land.”

“Very funny. The actual rich never fly commercial.”

Mallory knows that. She wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, ever since Michael returned from the “wilderness” (another code name for Hell), she’s suspected that he cracked the case wide open and is now waiting for her to catch up.

“Whoever is behind the socialite murders incriminated Dinah to make it look she incriminated Dominique. That takes two powerful witches out of the game. But why? They’re such different witches.”

“That may be true, but my Father has every reason to eliminate any potential allies. Those two certainly fit the bill.”

“So they want us in a weakened state. They profit from sowing panic in the media, among a public that already hates witches. And what better way than to splash a few witch murders all over the six o’clock news?”

He nods, looking disappointed in humanity. “A tradition like voodoo is the perfect scapegoat.”

Mallory remembers how some of the younger Robichaux’s students looked at Queenie when she showed off her unique ability to survive any attack totally unscathed. They didn’t trust her magic because none of them could do what she did, and no amount of reassurance that she was Salem-descended like them would ease their worries. They had looked at Mallory the same way when she brought a sparrow back from the dead.

“And Satan’s the mastermind?”

“I doubt he’s directly involved. A powerful demon has possessed one of the ‘old money’ socialites. The ringleader is a woman with a grudge against the younger _arrivistes_ , a convenient vessel.”

It sounds like the work of a coven to Mallory, but Michael shakes his head. “Sure, you can think of it as a coven, only without the magic, feminism, and basic human fellow-feeling. The demon is the only one with any power.”

“You think he’ll be there, at the retreat?”

“Maybe.” Her looks pensive, like he’s still working out the final details of the case. “This may be a bad time to ask, Mallory, but can you perform an exorcism? I sincerely hope so because I can’t do it, for obvious reasons.”

An exorcism? Her stomach lurches forward at the word, whether from the plane beginning its descent or the thought of fighting an otherworldly entity, she can’t sure. Then again, an otherworldly entity is sitting right beside her.

“I’ll improvise.” 

Finally he smiles, bad mood lifting away.

***** 

In the sunroom of a Gatsby-like mansion built in the roaring twenties, Satanists gather around a sacrifice. An inverted pentagram has been drawn on the floor and a marble table set up in the middle of it. Strapped to the table is Coco St.-Pierre Vanderbilt, a rolled-up Hermes scarf stopping her mouth. Standing at the five points of the pentagram are five women of a certain age, all wearing daytime pastels under their matching black cloaks.

One holds a knife in her bejewelled hands, ready to plunge it into Coco’s heart.

“I don’t think I can do this, Cecily, I’m not ready…”

The one named Cecily Havemeyer projects an air of total calm. “Nonsense, Bunny,” she replies. “You were born to kill. I knew it from the second I laid eyes on you.”

Bunny Callahan has wanted to make the trade for quite some time, and now she’s getting cold feet about spilling innocent blood. It’s as if the knife in her hand made her realize the finality of the act. Selling your soul is nothing like returning a dress to Barney’s when the cut is all wrong for your body type.

“She’s going to all this trouble, and it won’t even work,” whines an older brunette, the only person in the room with authentic title. Baroness Teresa von Wartenburg-Loringhoven keeps checking her phone, clearly bored with the proceedings. “We should have used an actual virgin with the correct blood type.”

“Do born-again virgins count? Arabella became one after her second divorce, and that bitch stole my nanny _and_ my personal chef.”

The Baroness rolls her eyes at Marianna Astor, a woman so pathetic she uses the sacred act of devil worship to enact petty revenge. “You can forget Arabella. Even if she were a real virgin, the juice is too tainted to serve our Dark Lord. Everyone knows her blood type is Pinot Grigio.”

“If we don’t end up sacrificing the Vanderbilt girl, I swear I’m quitting Satanism for good,” says one Barbara “Beaver” Latimer, nicknamed so not for her protruding front teeth but her husband’s bizarre request that she wear a merkin on her lasered pudenda. They’re performing the Black Mass in her summer home, and quite frankly, she expected Bunny to be a little more eager about popping her evilness cherry. “I _demand_ we have a sacrifice today, goddamn it. I decorated, I cooked, I made it nice!”

The Baroness sneers at this obvious lie. “Your army of maids hoovered and scrubbed and polished every inch of this marble mausoleum, while you sat around with your Manolos in the air, ordering cakes and pastries from Maison Vilatte.”

Marianna nods, ears reddening with second-hand embarrassment. “It’s true. The monogrammed cupcake liners gave it away.”

Beaver gazes back in shock, scanning their faces one by one. “None of you ungrateful bitches would recognize home-baking if it hit you in the Botoxed forehead.”

“Jesus, Beaver, calm down,” says Bunny. “Take a Xanax.”

Now that the tide is turning against another member of their circle, she’s less conspicuous in her cowardice, and all but forgets the sacrificial weapon still in her hand.

“I know why she’s acting so irritable today,” offers the Baroness. “Can’t you see she’s on a new diet? It’s basically vodka, Quaaludes, and jizz.”

Meanwhile, the victim bound and gagged on the table is listening to all this and trying her best to strategize through the fog of fear. Mallory and Michael could still arrive to save Coco from these lunatics, but how would they know she’s in danger? The magical detectives are many miles away in New York, and unless one of them is capable of long-range divination, she’s on her own with these bitches who brunch and apparently murder.

A fat lot of good her so-called powers are doing her now. Coco can barely move a fountain pen across the table with her telekinesis. If only she possessed Mallory’s skill with the Wonder, she would strangle them all with their necklaces without breaking a sweat.

And as for Michael, she suspects there’s no magic that man hasn’t mastered. Though he’s oddly reluctant to use it, like he’s afraid of his own strength. 

“Quiet,” Cecily commands. She has stopped dead in her tracks, as if listening to an alarm no one else hears.

The butler appears at the door.

“Mrs. Latimer, there is a visitor waiting for you in the vestibule,” he speaks directly to Beaver, clearly rattled by something, though not by the sight of a woman bound to the table. “He’s very insistent that you come now.”

“Send him in,” the ringleader orders.

“Wait a minute, Cec, we don’t know who this guy is…”

“Sure we do. He’s the Antichrist.” A horrible grimace distorts her face right then, stretching her features into alien shapes. The human façade is beginning to crack as the demon inside takes the reins.

Beaver, Marianna and the Baroness all watch her—him—in wide-eyed disbelief. Only Bunny has the courage, or stupidity, to respond to the news that Satan’s son is in their neck of the woods. “That’s… good?”

No, it most certainly isn’t good, thinks the demon.

All Michael has to do is step through the doorway into the narrow shaft of afternoon light streaming in through the French windows, and the socialites are bowing and scraping on the floor, nearly blinded by the kind of male beauty never seen outside of a Renaissance painting. Coco’s bindings are magically undone, the scarf removed from her mouth, and the girl herself transmuted away to an undisclosed location. Satan’s son never leaves the room. He doesn’t have to. Truth be told, the demon expected a lesser show of power.

“I’m in the presence of my Lord,” mutters the one who wouldn’t swing the knife to lose her soul.

“Imbeciles! He’s not your king,” the demon roars, steam coming out of his ears. If he’s too careless about how he expresses his fury, Cecily’s head will start revolving on its axis until her neck snaps in two, and he needs this fleshy vessel intact for a little while longer.

Unless there’s a more viable body nearby he could possess, say, a body that belongs to a powerful witch…

“Michael Langdon. We meet again.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Abraxas. Remember what I told you last time we met?”

Abraxas laughs and it sounds like church bells caught in a snow storm, an avalanche destroying the Vatican.

“How could I forget? That if I ever showed my face here, you’d bind me to the smallest closet in the Murder House and leave me there for a thousand years with only your grandmother for company.”

“And you decided to test my resolve?”

“Your power isn’t what it used to be.” The demon circles him, running his manicured fingers through the double strand of pearls around his neck. His green eyes are totally white now, all sclera and no cornea. “Did you really think your Father would sit back as you disgraced yourself and His cause?”

The other socialites are still gaping dumbly, unsure how to react to this confrontation, lacking even the presence of mind to flee. Did they know their friend Cecily was possessed? Maybe they thought her newfound magic was something she ordered online off the James Edition, like a helicopter or a gold-plated AK-47.

Their eyes grow even wider as an unknown woman materializes behind Cecily and whacks her on the head with a heavy bronze candelabrum. The socialite immediately crumples to the floor, but the demon is too strong, pulling her strings like a puppet. Abraxas is back on its feet in no time, glaring at the witch who felled him, then back at Michael.

“Satan wanted to end the world, but he’ll settle for ending yours.”

Before her friend knows what’s happening, Mallory finds herself in a telekinetic hold, and the demon is levitating Bunny’s knife until it’s poised over her throat, ready to play her like a violin.

The air pressure in the room drops and invisible storm clouds gather under the ceiling. Silence reigns supreme. You could hear a pin drop on the marble floor. No one even breathes.

“Easy,” the Antichrist warns. There’s a kind of violence in his eyes that Mallory hasn’t seen before, not even when he nearly tore her apart under influence from the mind-control dust.

“I could end her right now, but I won’t,” says the foolish thing wearing Cecily Havemeyer like last season’s Gucci. She struggles to break the mental grip on her body, but the demon holds on. “In fact, I like her much better than my current host. This one is younger, sweeter, more powerful…”

Those last words are the tipping point for Michael because in the next instant all the objects in the room—the furniture, the floor, the walls, the hapless socialites still cowering in helpless wonder—start shaking like a fissure is opening in the earth below, ready to devour the mansion and everyone in it.

All it takes is for the knife to graze the girl’s neck as Abraxas loses concentration, drawing the tiniest bit of blood, and Michael’s eyes are turning pitch black.

Snapping Cecily’s neck like a twig, he sends the other socialites flying backwards with such force that each leaves a bloody spot where she collides with the wall.

He doesn’t stop to survey the carnage all. He doesn’t seem aware of it. Instead he’s running to Mallory and touching the skin on her neck, examining what amounts to a papercut. From the way he’s acting, you’d think she was murdered before his eyes.

“You’re not hurt, Mallory? For fuck’s sake, say you’re not hurt!”

“It’s nothing, Michael. A scratch.”

It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty that lay behind the composure her friend presents to the world. Those strange eyes of his are normally the color and clarity of a pristine glacier, yet now they turn cloudy and dim, and the full lips are quivering, white as a sheet.

“You’re right,” he whispers. “It’s quite superficial.”

She gets up and looks around the room, wincing at the violence he unleashed.

“What happened to the demon? Is it capable of resurgence?” 

“I don’t think so. He should be back in Hell where he belongs. But it wouldn’t hurt to perform a quick exorcism after you do the Vitalum Vitalis.”

Mallory sighs at the thought of all the magical feats she’ll have to perform. At least Coco is alive and well, stowed away in a confession booth of a nearby church.

“Are you planning to help? I know you can do the breath of life. Unless you’d rather avoid administering mouth-to-mouth to these women.”

After they clean up in the mansion, they’ll retrieve the heiress (after they find her some clothes) and take everyone back to the police station, performing a little Concilium where needed to get the women talking about their devilish exploits. In no time at all, the public will be baying for blood when it learns about the Havemeyers, the Callahans, the Astors, the Latimers, and all the rest of their privileged kind.

She can see the headlines now. Satanists of Second Avenue! Luciferians of Lennox Hill!

“Shall we start?”

Having arranged all the bodies in a line, Michael kneels beside Cecily’s, surveying the damage he did without a trace of regret. From the way his jaw clenches as he works, it’s a good thing for everyone in this mansion—no, everyone in this annoyingly perfect town, if not everyone in Massachusetts, or everyone on the whole Eastern seaboard—that Mallory managed to survive the encounter with Abraxas.

If all goes well, Dominique Aguillard will return to her hospital and the community that relies on her healing potions and powders, and even the disgraced name of Dinah Stevens will be cleared of suspicion in witch circles. At least, where these particular crimes are concerned.

*****

It’s three o’clock in the morning, the witch’s hour, when they agreed to meet.

When Michael transmutes to a secluded spot near the ornate entrance arch of the Manhattan Bridge, he’s completely alone on the walkway, with nary a junkie for company. It’s oddly deserted, even for this time of night. He soon finds out why.

Somebody, or some witch, has placed a boundary spell around all the pedestrian parts of the bridge. It’s a mystery why he’s able to cross it, until he remembers that such spells can be designed to bar entry to all humans while allowing others to pass. And he knows what category of “other” he belongs to.

Not ethereal, like the witches, but the other “other.” Demonic.

“Ladies? Is anyone there?”

They’re hiding in the shadows, watching him work out their strategies, but he doesn’t have all night to wait, not with Mallory sleeping at home, recovering from a traumatic and exhausting day.

The first witch to emerge into the light wears a black leather coat that nearly sweeps the ground. Earrings in the shape of fig leaves dangle from her ears, while her natural curls are piled high on her head and tied back with a gold and purple scarf.

To say that she’s unhappy to see him would be the understatement of the century. 

“You hate me, Dinah, even after I solved the murders and cleared your name, such as it is?”

Eyes blazing, Dinah looks far from grateful.

“You told my son what happened to Stu. You showed him the spell book, and now he refuses to speak to me.”

“You used his boyfriend to bind your spells, increasing their potency. Some might say you got exactly what you deserved.”

Another woman’s voice booms from the shadows. “And what do you deserve, white devil?”

Ageless and timeless, Marie Laveau would be equally at home performing a ritual on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain in 1874 as disco-dancing on the glittering floor of Studio 54 circa 1978. Her braids are so long they reach past her waist, and the silk coat she’s wrapped in from head to toe matches her lipstick, glowing crimson under the street lamps. She looks every inch the legendary voodoo queen she is, or used to be, before a certain Loa claimed her soul and set her on an eternity of torturing her mortal enemies, the LaLauries.

“Fancy meeting the son of Satan on a bridge! How symbolic,” she mocks. “You better not be wasting my precious time.”

The two witches trust each other no more than they trust Michael. Now that he’s returned Marie to the land of the living, he wonders how soon she’ll reclaim her rightful voodoo crown, and if Dinah will offer any resistance. He hopes they will learn to coexist, ideally on opposite sides of the country. Dinah has been planning a move to Los Angeles for a while now, to pursue her dreams of hosting a talk show, and Marie has been talking about starting a new life right here in New York.

While he no longer has any leverage with his Father among the Illuminati—not that Dinah would ever sell her soul to the devil; she’s too pragmatic to find the trade worthwhile—Michael likes the talk show idea and wishes her all the best. As for Marie, a powerful ally is always nice to have in the city, especially now that dark forces are gathering on the horizon, ready to strike.

“In my defense, Stu was a known embezzler and art forger who was only using my son for his cash and connections in the gallery world,” the new voodoo queen is explaining to the old one, who scoffs in her face. “He didn’t love Andre at all, so I did the kind thing and removed him my son’s life before he could learn of the betrayal. You would have done no different if you were in my place, Marie Laveau.” Then she remembers an interesting piece of gossip she’d heard from a witch in New Orleans. “Well, that’s not quite true. You gave your firstborn to Papa Legba in exchange for immortality. And the soul of an innocent as tribute every year after that.”

Marie ignores her, never breaking eye contact with Michael. “I’ve made mistakes in the past, mistakes for which I have yet to atone.” She sneers at the Antichrist, who has the gall to walk the Earth, free and unpunished for his myriad sins while others suffer in Hell.

“But he’s worse than any of us,” Dinah observes, and the two witches are finally in agreement.

“Damn right. Tell me, Michael, does that former Robichaux’s student you live with know about all the Black Masses you led with those lunatics in the Valley? Does she know about the two innocent souls you incinerated in the Murder House, where you yourself were conceived from the rape of an innocent woman by a ghost? Does she—”

“Enough, Marie. Mallory knows what I am.”

“And she doesn’t run for the hills?” Marie whistles. “The sweet little witch must have one hell of a savior complex.”

“Don’t talk about her in that way.”

“Or what? What are you going to do, _literal_ white devil?” She struts to the edge of the bridge and looks over the railing at the East River, which has seen its share of sins, all the cruelty that human beings are capable of inflicting on one other, often for no reason at all. “Nothing. You need us both in the fight ahead.”

Before they part ways, having discussed the finer points of their “cooperation,” as Michael calls it, Marie softens a touch. “Give my regards to your landlady. A little birdie told me that her vampirism is finally under control.”

The “little birdie” must be Papa Legba. The gatekeeper of Hell has nothing better to do than keep tabs on vampires now?

“I’ll tell Mrs. Hudson you said hi.”

Left alone on the bridge, Michael reflects. He didn’t like their accusatory tone or the morally superior way they looked at him when they weren’t flinging insults. And yet he has to admit the witches were right. He _is_ the worst among them, by far. It’s not even a contest. He deserves to burn in Hell for all eternity, or suffer whatever special punishment Satan devises for his only begotten son. 

No redemption is possible for Michael Langdon because Michael Langdon was born evil and wrong, predestined for damnation, bound to fail. 

Still, he has no choice to keep fighting.

If not for himself, then for the world.

If not for the world, then for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a few quotes here from ACD canon and other sources that I adapted.
> 
> “The Final Problem” is where I got this line: “He [Moriarty] sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans…” 
> 
> This one is from “The Copper Beeches,” said by Holmes while he rides the train through the country: “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
> 
> The section when Michael worries that Mallory is hurt contains a few lines from “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” where Watson is shot in the leg and Holmes tells the shooter that, “If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.” The difference is that Michael slaughters everyone in the room the second that Mallory gets the tiniest cut, lol. 
> 
> The following is something Lord Blackwood says in a deleted scene from the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr: “I wanted to [end] the world, but I’ll settle for ending yours.” 
> 
> My characterization of the upper-class Satanists took inspiration from the Real Housewives of New York. IsoldeDax's brilliant “Absolves No One” also features a character who’s based on a Real Housewife of New York.


	5. A Scandal in New Orleans (Part 1 of 4)

Michael feigns innocence, but he knows perfectly well what he did.

Mallory doesn’t have a violent bone in her body, and yet she’s so very tempted to punch a hole in the wall right now, then start a fire and burn their brownstone to the ground, then hex her roommate into oblivion. Not necessarily in that order.

“The kiss, Michael. Two months ago? After the opera?”

“Oh.” He looks genuinely confused. “I don’t remember any kiss.”

“You don’t remember? How can you not remember?” She grinds her teeth and balls her fists and even stamps her foot like an overgrown toddler. “Michael, you’re a living encyclopaedia of magical lore and true crime factoids, not to mention all that mysterious knowledge that Papa Satan used to just _pour_ into your brain whenever you needed it.”

“Not anymore.” His voice sounds small, uncertain. “I’m only human, Mal. Sometimes I forget things.”

He’s lying. No, he’s telling the truth. She can’t really tell.

If he really doesn’t remember the kiss, it’s because he banished it from his mind with a spell. But what kind of magic could scrub your brain of an unwanted memory without frying all the emotional circuitry tied to that memory and leaving you more depressed than before? If such a spell even exists, can it be self-administered in the privacy of one’s bathroom, say, or does it require the same immense skill as an identity block, the kind that’s catalyzed by magical dust? Because Mallory sure could use a spell like that right about now.  And she's no Cordelia.

Where Michael conveniently “forgot” about their kiss, she’s been unable to think of anything else over the last couple of months, no matter how hard she tries to suppress the lingering burn of him crashing his lips against her own so unexpectedly—and, just to be extra dramatic, after pulling her into a dark alleyway near the Metropolitan opera, away from the street lights and prying eyes of fellow music lovers.

What happened? Let’s start at the beginning, on the morning of that wretched day in early December.

At this stage in their magical crime-solving partnership, things were deceptively calm. They were settling into a kind of routine just as her classes were ending for the winter break and she was studying for her final exams, after which she could devote all her time to his investigations before she went to spend Christmas with her mother.

‘Twas the season for demons. There was a flurry of new cases in the three weeks before Christmas, mostly hauntings or possessions—though none were as sensational as the socialite killings masterminded by Abraxas and pinned on the two voodoo witches. That’s because these were lesser demons, Michael said. In theory their malevolence was limitless, but in practice their powers were limited, their ambitions modest. While lesser demons could still possess human beings, they weren’t strong enough to drive their victims to suicide, and most could be exorcised by a good priest. Still, it was important to identify and drive them out early, because once they found an innocent person, or preferably a family, to torment, they wouldn’t stop until that person’s life was in shambles and their relationships beyond repair.

Mallory was more interested in the other kind of demon that didn’t resort to possession but preferred to walk free in some kind of disguise.

The first was Valak, who took the form of a Catholic nun, red-eyed and cadaverous under his black-and-white habit, ready to inflict all manner of horrors on the schoolgirls left in his charge.

The second was Amdusias, who liked to impersonate an antiquarian bookseller. If you were unlucky enough to purchase a volume from his shop and read even a single line from it, Amdusias would have you tossing and turning all night, projectile-vomiting bile and speaking in hellish tongues until an exorcist came round, doused the book in holy water, and torched it with a flame flown in specially from Jerusalem.

They tracked Belphegor to a New Jersey suburb, where he was posing as the imaginary friend of a six-year-old girl whom he’d somehow convinced to grab a pair of gardening shears and creep up behind her mother as she weeded the flower beds. Luckily, no one got hurt before Michael and Mallory arrived on the scene, sent the demon back to Hell, and recommended a good psychiatrist from Columbia to deal with any lingering trauma.

At a house party in Bushwick was where they found Paimon, sporting a pair of skinny jeans and ironic handlebar moustache while enticing underage girls to sniff coke and pose for “artistic” nudes. One look at Michael had him yelping for mercy, but the former Antichrist wasn’t in a charitable mood. Rather than banish the creep back to the underworld where he belonged, he shrunk Paimon to the size of a homunculus, trapped him in a mason jar—don’t hipsters love mason jars?—and placed him on the highest bookshelf until such a time as he was satisfied that the legendary incubus had learned his lesson.    

Seeing as they were up to their ears in demons, Mallory simply assumed they would be staking out another one when Michael invited her to the opera.

It all began as such things usually do, with a dazzling display of deduction.

They were sitting in the living room, engaged in separate tasks—she studying for her final exam on Jungian theory, he perusing the classified section of the newspaper, searching for devil only knew what.

She went into the kitchen to check on the kettle and make them both tea—hers a flowery herbal mix with a dash of milk and honey, his the color of pitch and scalding hot.

When she returned with two steaming cups on a silver tray, he asked her a question without raising his eyes from the classifieds:

“Are you going with Madison to see the Mimi DeLongpre biopic tonight?”

“Excuse me?” She nearly dropped her tea cup. Those were her plans exactly, but there was no way that Michael knew Madison was in town. “How did you know?”

He smirked in that arrogant way of his. “If I tell you, you’ll just say it’s all so absurdly simple.”

“I won’t say that!”

“You will.” He began to explain with a shrug. “It was easy enough to deduce from the new Anthropologie dress hanging in your closet, which is a tad low cut, if you want my honest opinion, not to mention that disastrous attempt to trim your bangs last night. It all points to an ex-movie star being to town, someone who makes you feel inadequate about your general appearance.”

“W-what? I don’t feel inadequate.”

Here was a golden opportunity for Michael to pay her a compliment, but he didn’t take it.

“You do. And as for going to the movies, that’s just as obvious. Madison, bless her tiny, shrivelled heart, can’t act her way out of a paper bag. That makes her competitive with other actresses her age who are both talented and popular, and there’s no one who fits that description better than Emma Watson. Normally Madison would avoid her projects like the plague, or rehab, but the DeLongpre biopic has been such a dismal failure, both critically and commercially, that your friend can’t resist indulging in some good old-fashioned _schadenfreude_. And with a lost sister from her coven, no less! But Madison would never pay to see the film, so I'm assuming that you, my dear Mallory, are treating.”

Mallory went on drinking her tea, not caring if it burned her tongue. How reassuring that her life was an open book for her roommate to peruse whenever he pleased. And all she’d done was buy a new dress!

Well, there was still _one_ way she could get a little revenge.

“How absurdly simple!”

Michael folded up the paper with a huff and picked up his cup of Obsidian-colored brew, then looked her in the eye and asked her to, nay, _demanded_ that she cancel her plans with Madison, no questions asked. 

“I have tickets to the opera tonight. _Götterdämmerung_. Just the two of us in a private box.”

A private box? Under normal circumstances that would sound like a date, but Michael was nothing like normal. No one was better than her roommate at ruining the inherent romance of a candle-lit dinner at a high-end Italian restaurant, or a private opening at the Metropolitan museum, or a night out at the most exclusive club in Soho.

Take the Soho club as an example, which turned out to be a honeytrap to lure a vampire out of hiding. It was a good thing that Mallory had dressed to the nines that night. She was the “honey” and Michael the “trap.”

As for the museum opening, that turned into a stakeout at the personal request of the director who'd phoned Michael in a tizzy the night before, rambling about ghosts popping out of the air vents to terrorize visitors. Some hid in the paintings; one portrait of a certain “merry widow,” an aristocratic woman with long crimson hair and alabaster skin, gave every visitor who stared at her for longer than six seconds the same recurring nightmare. After the visitor went home and fell sleep, the painted widow would materialize at the foot of their bed, armed with a pillow (the sleeper woke up after the smothering, if they woke up at all).

Tonight’s invitation to the opera was probably more of the same. Mallory imagined a demon impersonating a duchess or a princess, and Michael pretending to enjoy Wagner while secretly observing her minutest actions through a pair of miniature binoculars.

No. She wasn’t breaking her plans. He could find someone else to take on his fool’s errand. (Mallory often wondered if the demons weren’t multiplying, getting bolder and hungrier the more of them they expelled.) Besides, she couldn’t cancel on Madison. However flawed and annoying the former actress could be, she was still her sister, and sisterhood mattered, now more than ever.

 

****

An hour before curtain call at the opera, Mallory was doing her best to squeeze into her new black dress without Michael’s help—the one from Anthropologie that he said was too low-cut. He was right: the black silk exposed the tops of her breasts and, if she bent over, a little more cleavage than was strictly tasteful. But so what? In a free country, Mallory was certainly allowed the pleasure of wearing a sexy garment, even a provocative one.

As she struggled to reach the zipper on the back, she knocked into the dresser and watched her half-read copy of _Venus in Furs_ fall to the ground, losing her page.  Seeing the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch splayed open like that made her wonder: was she a masochist and didn’t know it? Though she never, ever wore fur, it sure was fun to imagine herself as the much-desired Wanda, wrapped in nought but an ermine stole, leaving her lover in no doubt about her bestial nature.

What would happen if Mallory showed up looking like that at Michael’s door,clad in animal hide and nothing else, except perhaps Chanel 5, a garter belt with stockings, and a few jewels to set off the luxurious sheen of her skin?

The Wanda from _Venus in Furs_ dominated her lover, cracking the whip at his whimpering request. Mallory was the opposite, at least in the bedroom, at least in her mind (she’d never tried anything in real life). Her sexual persona was pliant and submissive, desirous of a masterful partner, someone who would punish her cruelly as she cried out for mercy, or pretended to, and then console her with the gentlest care.

Once the dress was zipped all the way up, Mallory stood before the full-length mirror, armed with a true hourglass figure as she put finishing touches on the look.

It wasn’t half bad. She liked how the dramatic eye shadow enhanced her doe eyes, and how her long hair glistened as it reached past her exposed shoulder blades. The black heels pinched her toes a little, but she planned to slip them off in the box anyway. Pleased with her appearance (for once), she grabbed her coat and sparkly purse and headed out.

Michael was waiting at the door, dressed in the black cape with the platinum devil-head clasps from his Hawthorne days. As usual, his dark clothes stood in stark contrast to his angelic features and halo of blonde curls that cascaded past his chin. What took the look to another level of operatic-Satanic grandeur were the red leather gloves, the only pop of color in the whole ensemble.

At first glance Mallory hadn’t realized they were gloves—it looked as if he’d been poking around in someone’s chest cavity—but she banished the terrible thought and complimented him on his outfit. 

He thanked her. She looked at him expectantly, waiting for a compliment of her own, but Michael said nothing. He seemed frozen in place, unable to utter another word. The seconds dragged on as they stared at each other in silence. When he finally spoke, his throat sounded dry, like he was ashamed to be caught staring. “Shall we?”

As he helped with her coat, she could feel his eyes raking over her form. The pregnant silence continued the whole time in the cab, coupled with the occasional awkward glance in her direction—that is, until Michael suddenly remembered to tell Mallory about the vampires running wild in Hoboken, a situation they would need to investigate at the earliest opportunity.

Things were less awkward by the time they arrived at the Metropolitan and made their way through the lush auditorium with its gilded columns and red velvet seats, past the guests in all their diamonds and finery, and towards their own little corner of heaven.

A private box with a perfect view of the stage—how her roommate had managed to wrangle it was a mystery to Mallory, though she suspected that Michael attended all his cultural events in the same style.

As much as she hated to admit it, the whole warlock look was perfect for the opera. He was certainly in his element here, trailing that long cape like a prince from a fairytale or, more realistically, a foreign dignitary with a flair for the dramatic.

 _Götterdämmerung_ was the opera, also known as the Twilight of the Gods.

It was the final installment Wagner’s _Ring of the Nibelung_ , and it ended with the world going up in flames.

It was five hours long.

To Mallory this meant spending five hours next to Michael in the dark, bathed in that irresistible hellish warmth he exuded, a warmth that became unbearably hot when he got emotional—and how couldhe fail to get emotional while listening to some of the most beautiful music ever written? 

The auditorium went dark. The curtain went up. They sat and they listened and they watched the Wagnerian drama unfold on the stage, starting with the three Norns, sister prophets who spun the rope of destiny to set up the tragic sequence of events that all could foresee yet none could prevent.

Brünnhilde sang of her love for Siegfried, the mortal grandson of the immortal Wotan; the king of the Norse gods just happened to be her father. And what a father he was—stripping his Valkyrie daughter of her immortality for a minor transgression, he placed her eternally slumbering form on a mountain top, guarded by an impenetrable ring of magical fire, to await a hero who could pass through the flames and awake her with true love's kiss.

Mallory closed her eyes and let the voices wash over her. Soprano, contralto, tenor, countertenor, baritone, bass—they rose and fell like the undulating surface of the ocean, revelling in heights of joy and depths of despair. She could feel Michael being transported too, leaning into the music with his entire soul, though his face remained a blank mask of indifference.

What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

At some point during the first act, she decided to slip off her high-heeled shoes and wriggle her stockinged toes. As she bent down to rub the sore balls of her feet, she lost her view of the stage— _that_ stirred her partner from his reverie.

“What are you doing?” he whispered into her ear. No, it simply wouldn’t do. If Mallory couldn’t keep her eyes on the stage and rub her own feet at the same time, it was only natural that he would step in. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, and Michael was nothing if not a gentleman.

“Sit back,” he ordered, and she watched as he removed his red gloves, peeling them off his fingers one by one. She had never really looked at his hands before, but now she could look nowhere else—now that those hands were lifting her legs to bring her feet into his lap. She was mesmerized by how large and strong they looked, how gracefully they moved as he flexed his knuckles and put the gloves in his breast pocket before he got down to work.

Should Mallory have objected to him rubbing her feet? Yes. No. Maybe.

All possible arguments against this new activity disappeared from her mind as he began to knead her soles with the skill of an expert, working his fingers deep into the muscle one moment, and the next hovering over her skin with the lightest of touches.

Closing her eyes again, but not because of the music, Mallory leaned into his clever hands as they traced the outline of her toes through her stockings before moving down to the roughened heels. In no time at all, her fashion-induced discomfort was a distant memory, what with Michael banishing it with the same determination he reserved for the most stubborn of demons.

So far, so good. The problems began when the intense heat from his hands began to creep up her legs, coiling around her calves and parting her thighs to reach her core, where it ignited a familiar flame in her depths—and just as the soprano on stage was singing her heart out, soaring over the highest peak of Wagner’s sonic landscape.

The fire that raged in her body was mirrored by the fire on stage, enveloping Brünnhilde and Siegfried without harming them the couple emerged from the mountaintop cave where they’d spent their first night together.

After the second intermission, Michael didn’t return to rubbing her now very satisfied feet. Perhaps regretting their earlier closeness, he looked awkward and stiff once more, and he was wearing his red gloves again, as if to guard against direct contact with her skin.

Vaguely disappointed, Mallory turned her attention back to the stage and watched the two star-crossed lovers glide towards their doom, their eternal love assailed by obstacles on all sides. 

Siegfried drank a potion that made him forget his love for Brünnhilde. Now when he looked at his beloved, he saw a stranger, and no amount of pleading could jog his memory or prevent him from marrying another. 

Disaster! Loss! By the end of the third act, Siegfried was impaled on his enemy’s sword—ingloriously, in his sleep—and Brünnhilde was building his funeral pyre and then leaping into the flames, which spread to engulf the dwelling place of the Gods.

Valhalla was burning.

 _She_ was burning.

Heedless of the consequences, Mallory grabbed one of Michael’s hands in both of hers and squeezed it with all her might, cursing the barrier of the gloves; when she then tried to remove one he stopped her, squeezing back so hard that she feared he would crush the bones. She needn’t have worried, though—Michael was so sorry about forgetting his own strength that he lifted the little hand to his lips, peppering it with the lightest of kisses as he whispered his usual apology.

Victory! Glove or no glove, their hands were still entwined after the curtain fell and they walked out on the street in a daze.

 _That_ was when it happened, with Michael walking ahead and Mallory lagging behind as she struggled to catch her breath in the icy air, and him not letting her.

Breathless, she could feel herself being pulled into a dark alleyway and then slammed against the wall as her own Siegfried peered into her eyes, reading the emotional chaos playing over her features like a Wagnerian leitmotif. He finally—finally; thank the Norse gods—removed his gloves before letting his hands rove up and down her body, tracing her shape through the coat before reaching her face and caressing her cheeks with infinite gentleness.

“Mallory,” he whispered into her mouth.

Her lips parted in surrender, ready to connect, but she didn’t dare to close the hair’s breadth of distance between them, not yet. The look in those glacier-chilled eyes was a prayer but also a warning.

“You continue to provoke me, even after everything you’ve seen me do…”  His breaths were coming in ragged now, as if the kraken that lived inside of him was waking up. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you had a death wish …”

“I did nothing!” She protested, but weakly, lying through her teeth. Her cheeks turning crimson in embarrassment, she tried to ignore the uncontrollable flood in her core that soaked through her lace panties and maybe her dress too, but it was no use.

After an agonizing wait that lasted a few seconds in reality, those plush, pillowy, bee-stung lips were finally seeking hers, claiming them in a kiss so mind-blowing that she forgot all about the winter cold and began shrugging off her coat to expose more of herself to his touch.

“Stop that,” Michael scolded when they broke apart. He forced her coat back on, brushing her bare shoulders in the process, and watched jealously as she bit on her bottom lip, almost hard enough to draw blood, as if to say: that's my job.

When he swooped down a second time,  his tongue rolled over that bruised lip before he sucked it into his mouth roughly, then captured it between his teeth lightly, exercising an inhuman amount of self-restraint. The inside of her mouth tasted sweeter than it had in the dreams that haunted his waking life, too sweet for a creature like him, absolutely forbidden...

But it wasn’t forbidden, was it? Here they were, their bodies pressed together in a freezing alley, generating devil only knew how many kilowatts of raw energy between them, their tongues clashing for dominance and… well, the world hadn’t ended.

When he stopped plundering her mouth, it was so he could pull down her scarf to reach her neck. He left a trail of kisses from her ear down to the underside of her jaw, seeking the pulse point with his tongue and finding the most delicate spot to suck a bruise into the skin, an ugly mark that would take days to heal. Mallory’s knees buckled from the intense sparks of pleasure this set off in her core, and if Michael hadn’t been there to pin her in place, she would have slid down the wall into a puddle of quivering want.

But it was not to be.

On their return home, they didn’t stumble into bed as Mallory had hoped. The moment he crossed the threshold of the brownstone, her roommate turned suddenly and inexplicably cold, and began to apologize profusely for “violating” her, and then later refused to speak at all, let alone about what had transpired in the alleyway.

It lasted for days, and then the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months.

He stopped asking her to play the Mendelssohn on her newly commissioned Strad, which lay silent and abandoned in its velvet case.                

He stopped doing all those little things that Mallory had begun to take for granted—like pressing her shirts or organizing her notes when she was running late for class, or surprising her with an elaborate meal when she returned, having prepared the _exact_ food she’d been craving all day, and refusing to explain how he knew.

The only thing that he needed her for these days were his beloved investigations, and even then, he preferred to solve his mysteries alone when he could.

If there was a demon to expel, but he couldn’t bring himself to utter the holy words? He called Mallory.

If there was a victim who needed to hear some words of comfort words, ideally spoken in a soft female voice and laced with the kind of psychobabble they taught her in school? Another job for Mallory.

But if Mallory herself complained about his strange new aloofness, or his unwillingness to meet her eye, or his inability to even _remember_ the moment of intimacy they’d shared only weeks before? He would listen impatiently to his conductor of light before disappearing for days on end, leaving a trail of unanswered calls and texts in his wake.

Fast-forward to today.

Even Circe misses him. It saddens Mallory to see how little energy her cat has these days, how she mopes around the radiator with no one to give those macabre little gifts of hers.

Or no one who appreciates them.

 

*****

“Mal, come look at this.”

It’s a cold morning in February when they disembark from the A train in Hoboken, on their way to deal with the vampires they neglected back in December—vampires that are now multiplying across New Jersey due to their neglect, and running some kind of blood donation racket out of a chain of old laundromats.

Michael grabs her arm as they pass an electronics store and guides her attention to the half-dozen television sets in the window, all of which are playing the same breaking news segment.

It’s a CNN interview with Cordelia Goode, reigning Supreme and headmistress of Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies. There’s no sound, but the interviewer must be asking tough questions because Cordelia has never looked more discomposed, like she’d rather be anywhere else than in that studio, with all those cameras bearing down on her face, recording and transmitting every micro-expression.

“Holy fuck,” Mallory gasps when she reads the headline:

**SUPREME WITCH DENIES ALLEGATIONS THAT SENATOR’S DAUGHTER RESURRECTED BY NEW ORLEANS COVEN**

“This is going to be an absolute PR disaster.”

Michael nods knowingly, like he’s been expecting something like this to happen for a long, long time.

For obvious reasons, the magical community has long denied the existence of such abilities as resurgence and the Vitalum Vitalis. Admitting to the public that a few select witches (but no warlocks) can raise the dead would bring enormous scrutiny of the coven’s operations at a time when suspicion of witchcraft is at an all-time high, and no amount of Jazz Age biopics about Mimi Delongpre were about to change _that_.

Now imagine if the public learned that this once-secret life magic was not so secret in the corridors of power—that men of means such as the Louisiana senator whose daughter was killed in a tragic car crash, or overdosed on a yacht, whichever way it happened, not only knew about it but could depend on it to bring his loved ones back from the dead.

“It’s been happening for centuries, Mal. Do you suppose that Napoleon Bonaparte was never brought back by Josephine Bonaparte, his conveniently witchy consort? Why do you think he was so ready to touch all those plague victims in Jaffa? That maniac had more lives than your cat does.”

She gets it, the toxic marriage of witches and power. But what she doesn’t get is why Cordelia doesn’t just admit the truth. She’s lying on a national broadcast!

Michael is mesmerized by Cordelia’s lying lips, drinking in the sight of her squirming in the hot seat.

“Your Supreme looks like a cornered animal. There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” He inhales deeply, closing his eyes, thinking intently. “But she didn’t expose the coven. No, this smells like Myrtle Snow.”

Out of nowhere, a striking, dark-haired woman in a pristine white coat walks onto the stage to whisper something in Cordelia’s ear. The mysterious words have an immediate effect on the Supreme, who tenses up in alarm and looks around the studio wildly.

The seems looks familiar to Mallory, but she can’t quite remember from where.

“Who’s that? I’ve seen her before.”

From the way that Michael’s eyes narrow in concentration, then glaze over in reminiscence, it’s clear that he knows her too, maybe even personally. Maybe even intimately.

“That’s Cordelia’s crisis manager,” he replies nonchalantly, snapping out of his daze. “Smart move to hire the best in the biz.”

There’s a barely concealed note of longing in his voice that freezes the blood in Mallory’s veins, bringing fresh torments. As if Michael’s ignoring her isn’t enough.

“I see,” she grits through her teeth, doing her best to ignore how her heart pitterpatters away in her chest like a schoolgirl playing jump rope. “I thought you said you had no friends.”

Michael whips around to face her, taken aback by the bitterness lacing her words, but his look of astonishment soon gives way to a look of bemusement.

 _Jealousy_. The green-eyed monster hasn’t come to play.

“Irene is hardly a friend, Mallory. She’s more of a foe. Depending on the circumstances.”

Her galloping heart slows down a little. A foe? That’s something that her battered and bruised ego can live with, provided that this "Irene" isn’t the kind of foe you love to hate.

Irene puts a steadying hand on Cordelia’s shoulder before walking off stage. Her strength and composure radiate off the screen. It works; the Supreme looks calmer already.

“When the Church of Satan ran into some problems with bad publicity,” Michael explains, “they hired Adler & Associates to handle the optics. And when the tide of public opinion turned so decisively against the Church that no amount of talk about secular rebellion and freedom of speech could save their reputation, Irene was the first on the stand to testify against Anton LaVey. It’s her testimony that put him in Sing Sing.”

So _that’s_ where Mallory knows the woman from: a high-profile Satanist trial from a few years back. She probably repressed it because it reminded her of the darkest chapters in Michael’s past, but it’s still kind of weird.

“If LaVey was her former client, why would his publicist betray him? That’s hardly professional. I thought you said she’s the best in the biz.”

Michael smiles fondly again, probably thinking of that blasted Irene, and Mallory’s heart beats wildly again, sounding the drumbeat of envy—a capital vice, a deadly sin.

“That woman always knows which way the wind blows. She’s so good at what she does that she can betray a client today and sign ten richer clients tomorrow. That’s Irene for you.”

Some kind of game is clearly afoot, because he hasn’t sounded this excited since the Abraxas murder spree.

“As much as I despise your Supreme, something tells me we’re needed in New Orleans. Would you be opposed to leaving tonight, on the red-eye?”

Mallory sighs, theatrically, as if she’s willing to consider it, but only just. Cordelia’s not her favorite person either, but the prospect of seeing the rest of her coven has her more than a little giddy.

“I’ll go, but only if I can get a cat sitter. She’s been awful needy lately, probably because you’ve been neglecting her.”

She pouts. He's been neglecting more than just Circe.

Michael closes his eyes and slumps against the window of the electronics store, his features contorted by pain and regret over his recent spate of bad behavior.

“Mallory, I’m so sorry…. over the past few months I’ve been literally unbearable… I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

She looks him up and down appraisingly, wrinkling her nose as if he doesn't pass muster. Then she smiles. “I forgive you.”

It’s so easy to say. How can she stay mad at a man who's in such obvious pain, struggling with both personal and literal demons every day of his life?

When Michael smiles back, it’s innocent—a smile unburdened of his endless need to atone for the sins of the past, lest he turn into the monster he was born to be. It’s a smile like the pale sun appearing between storm clouds in retreat, a ray of spring to warm the cold, barren earth.

“I know just the woman to take care of your cat. How would you like to meet our landlady?”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone for reading, as always. 
> 
> Michael’s kind of a dick here, but he’ll soften as the case progresses. Apart from Irene Adler, who appears in ACD’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” there’s only one other Sherlockism in this chapter. The deduction scene is based on “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” where Holmes deduces that Watson isn’t planning to invest in South African securities and Watson calls it “absurdly simple” when it’s explained to him. 
> 
> There are a few Easter Eggs as usual, like a reference to The Conjuring series. You can probably guess what primetime queen inspired my version of Irene Adler, but she’ll emerge as a new character in her own right soon enough.


	6. A Scandal in New Orleans (Part 2 of 4)

The school is under siege. Media vans are parked all along the cast iron fence. Reporters aren’t allowed inside the pristine white walls of Miss Robichaux’s and so they stare at its shuttered windows, cameras at the ready just in case a witch, any witch, decides to show herself. When one finally does, it’s not the witch they were hoping for—Cordelia Goode has been missing since her interview on CNN in the wake of the Vitalum scandal, and no amount of media detective work has turned up the Supreme—but the indomitable, flame-haired Myrtle Snow.

Myrtle approaches the gate and takes a long hard look at the good men and women of the press. Then she starts yelling.

“Philistines! Cowards! Imbeciles! Gossip mongers! War pornographers! Purveyors of fake news! Who do you think you are? Come here and I’ll show you what I think of your so-called profession.”

A few of the journalists make the mistake of pulling out their phones to film her tirade, but their devices go dead when she waves her hand and utters a few Latin words.

Two detectives watch all this unfold from a car parked at the end of the street.

“I told you that Myrtle doesn’t play. She just fried their equipment.” Mallory marvels at the older witch and passes Michael the binoculars. After spending the last half hour trying to figure out the best way to make their entrance, they’ve decided that Mallory should go through the front door and Michael through the back.

The last thing they want is for some inquisitive reporter to recognize him from the high-profile Satanist trials a few years ago, when he briefly appeared in court and in the papers as “the boy raised in a devil cult.” Thankfully, the nation never learned the truth about his parentage, and now with the Apocalypse on indefinite hold, it never will. Or so Mallory hopes.

“The wards are strong, but there’s a weak link in the magical fence around the back,” he observes with total nonchalance. “Besides, Cordelia is nowhere near the school.”

“That’s weird. Where do you think she went?”

Michael is so acutely sensitive to the magnetic fields that emanate from all magic users that he could tell her the exact number of witches in any given square mile, along their approximate levels of power and emotional states. It’s inconvenient for Mallory on a personal basis, but endlessly useful on their investigations.

“Patience, Mal. All will be revealed in due time.”

This is going to be one interesting case. While Michael refuses to tell her what they’re really investigating, there’s clearly something darker at play than the media scandal that started when the senator’s daughter got revived in secret.

Mallory doesn’t know what she expected her roommate to act like when they landed in New Orleans, but there’s still a lot of tension between them, a great deal of unspoken hurt. Sooner or later, they’ll have to sit down and talk about everything that’s gone wrong since that accursed kiss after the opera. But that day is not today.

If she’s being honest with herself, the problems started even before the opera. The real issue was the enormous guilt that Michael felt upon his return from Hell with a new Stradivarius tucked under his arm, looking to atone for his near-assault on Mallory, when he’d been under the influence of a mind-control substance cooked up by his enemies. He couldn’t ignore Mallory when he was battered and bruised, dirty and exhausted, hungry and dehydrated, and wanting nothing more than to crawl into the nearest hole and never again emerge into the light of day.

No, Michael _needed_ Mallory then, needed her to make him whole again. And she was more than happy oblige—to feed him, to bathe him, to shave him, to dress him in flannel pajamas, to tuck him into a warm bed, and even to get under the covers with him when he claimed that he couldn’t sleep alone, letting him cling to her body all night long like a shipwrecked man clinging to a plank in the middle of a raging ocean.

How did Michael repay her? With a little kindness at the start, just enough to bring the Abraxas case to a successful conclusion. But his kindness is fleeting; it’s the mirage of an oasis in an endless desert, a resource that he hoards jealously and only doles out to those who need it more than Mallory does.

A client who was possessed by a demon until recently might get a few kind words from Michael and a pat on the back, but only in the immediate aftermath of their life being in danger. He never wants to pursue a friendship with a client after solving the case.

With Mallory it’s different. He couldn’t avoid her if he tried, and he specifically asked her to be his conductor of light, and yet her very proximity unnerves him like no demon ever can.

There are feelings involved—Mallory knows that much. Feelings scare and confuse Michael. They stir up something in him that he is unwilling to face. He claims that he _can’t_ face it, not now, possibly not ever—not if he wants to stay on the path of Light that he is forever being tempted to stray from.

But he doesn’t have to be so rude about it, Mallory thinks, so cold and indifferent in his manner towards his roommate and only friend.

Mallory waits a few minutes after Michael gets out of the car to make her own way inside, mingling with the crowd of journalists as she waits for Myrtle to notice her.  

“Oh my sweet child,” the older woman mumbles into her hair as they embrace. Myrtle is clearly happy to see her, a lost lamb ready to be reintegrated into the flock, but the feeling isn’t exactly mutual. “Where have you been? How has New York been treating you? Rumor has it that you’re living with that devil spawn, but that can’t possibly be true.”

Mallory barely has the heart to tell her that, yes, she _is_ living with the devil spawn and not only that, but the devil spawn is right here in New Orleans with her, following his hunch that there’s a lot more to the Vitalum scandal than meets the eye.

“Darling, say it ain’t so!” Myrtle widens her eyes. “Whatever could compel you to do something so foolish? Michael may be a second-rate detective but he’s a first-rate villain, and if I hear that he’s hurt you in any way—

“Michael would never hurt me,” Mallory cuts her off before she starts threatening her friend. “It’s not in his nature, despite what you all may think. In fact, if you plan on talking that way about Michael to his face, I’m booking the next flight home and taking him with me.”

All the reasons why she left the coven are coming back to her now. To Myrtle, Mallory is the prodigal daughter who is out gallivanting with mortals and sowing her wild oats before she returns to take her rightful place at the head of the coven. But does anyone ask Mallory if she wants to return? Does anyone inquire if she wants to be the next Supreme, accepting as her destiny the result of some flawed test of fitness, a test dating back to the days when slaves still walked the hallowed halls of Miss Robichaux’s—a test so dangerous, in fact, that performing one measly part of it wrong costs a witch her immortal soul?

She may be a witch that is cursed with a stupid amount of magical ability, but she’s also a mortal endowed with free will. Shouldn’t it be _her_ choice to make, like it was Michael’s choice to deny the path his Father set out for him? 

“I meant no offense, dear girl.” The red-haired witch looks concerned as they reach the front door, which she unlocks with her magic. She’s prepared to treat Mallory with kid gloves, for now. Behind closed doors, however, the entire coven will conspire about how to lure her back under their roof and away from their former enemy.  

“I don’t belong here,” she declares, hoping to preempt any such discussions. “Not anymore.”

“You _do_ belong, Mallory, even if that creature you came with doesn’t. You’ve always belonged, despite the rather unfortunate turn of events when you took your Seven Wonders. Cordelia bungled that one pretty badly, as much as I love the girl.”

“No kidding.”

Mallory tries not to think about the absolute disaster that was her Descensum a few years back. She can forgive but never forget.

The interior of Miss Robichaux’s looks the same as ever. Everything is painted the same infuriating shade of white, the air pregnant with ethereal magic. The only difference is the buzz of activity and the tense energy that she’s never felt before. There are new faces everywhere, most belonging to witches younger than herself. They talk animatedly in the corridors and on the staircase while keeping their voices low enough so she doesn’t hear.

“What’s going on?”  She asks Myrtle. “I don’t see anyone I know. Where’s Cordelia?”

“She’ll be back soon enough. The rest of the council has assembled upstairs to discuss an urgent and private matter. Cordelia’s publicist is here, Irene something or other. She can answer your questions.”

“No,” Mallory practically shouts, grabbing Myrtle by her voluminous couturier’s sleeve. “ _You_ explain. The energy feels really off in here, like there’s an intruder on the premises, something dark and unfriendly, and it’s not coming from Michael.”

Myrtle sighs. There’s just no keeping secrets from this intuitive girl. Yes, the air _is_ different in the academy, and there’s a good reason for that. She’ll explain everything if Mallory kindly follows her into the dining room and enchants the door with a silencing spell.

Once she’s certain that they’re not being listened to, Myrtle collapses into a chair and puts her head in her hands.

“We have a problem, and it’s a lot bigger than the Vitalum scandal that’s blowing up everyone’s Twitter and making proletarians show up at our door with their dead in tow, _demanding_ that we resurrect them, just like we did for that senator.”

_Proletarians_ , Mallory repeats in her head. Yep, that’s the classist Myrtle she knows, always exalting some royal or other whose family history intersects with the history of the coven, and never a kind word for the unwashed masses.

“It was my fault, darling, about the man’s daughter. She was so young and had yet to experience all that life has to offer. The senator came to us privately, and he’s been so good about pushing witch-friendly legislation through to the top levels of government, how could we refuse?”

Mallory frowns. It’s corruption, pure and simple. Pay to play, tit for tat. And now that the public is becoming aware of how immensely powerful the witches truly are, there’s no telling where their curiosity will lead.

Just because there are no existing laws to govern things like the Vitalum Vitalis doesn’t mean that she can’t imagine a world in which the use of magic is legislated and regulated by the courts, or worse, submitted to the merciless grind of neoliberal capitalism.

The police already distrust Michael, and this will only make it worse. What would police work even look like if a victim could give testimony at their own murder trial?

Myrtle is trembling from rage and guilt, but she has yet to shed a single tear. Mallory wonders if she’s ever seen her cry.

“It all started with two new girls that have been staying with us since September. Two exchange students, one from France and the other from Hungary. Gabrielle Lalonde and Katalin Szabó are their names. Now, these girls have been troublemakers from the start. They pretended to obey Cordelia’s house rules at first, but when no one was looking, they were running wild with every conceivable mischief. Something about growing up with strict parents. We didn’t have the heart to send them home.”

“What did they do? And what happened to them?”

“I’m getting to that. The worst part was the spells that Gabrielle and Katalin liked to perform behind closed doors. Can you imagine that the two naughty witches attempted Descensum together? That’s how we caught them. Gabrielle had performed her descent successfully, that lucky little bitch, but Katalin was stuck in her personal hell for a few minutes before her roommate thought to alert us.

“That can’t be the problem, then, if they both made it out of Hell alive. They must be strong witches.”

Myrtle nods. “They _are_ strong witches, Gabrielle and Katalin, too strong for their age and temperament.”

There is a commotion right outside the door (which is audible because silencing spells one work in one direction) and Mallory can hear the higher-pitched voices of the girls mingling with a deeper woman’s voice that can only belong to one person: Irene Adler, Cordelia’s crisis manager, the woman that Michael seems to know from the Satanist trials and not actively dislike.

Whatever her story, Mallory hates her already. Familiar pinpricks of jealousy are doing a little jig on the back of her neck and churning her gut into a complicated knot of jealousy, guilt and arousal. The older witch is still talking, unaware of her changing mental state. She gets the urge slap Myrtle in the face, knock off her cats-eye glasses and mess up her troll-doll hair.

“When Cordelia forbid the girls from leaving their rooms for three weeks as a punishment, Gabrielle used voodoo to break the magical boundary that we cast around her room and then snuck out to go drinking in the Quarter. She didn’t take Katalin with her, but wait until you hear what happened later.”

The story continues to unfold through Myrtle’s perspective, which makes Mallory wonder what the older witch isn’t telling her. When Gabrielle snuck out to the French Quarter for a night at her favorite jazz club, she didn’t notice that she was being followed until it was too late. An unknown assailant armed with a high-precision sniper rifle stood on the roof of the building next door and put a bullet through her forehead, and the music was so loud that few revelers even heard the gunshot ring out across the crowded club.

It was the work of witch hunters, Myrtle is certain—an ancient cabal of evil men with whom Fiona Goode had negotiated a century-long cease fire before she died and her daughter rose as Supreme. And now that the tenuous _détente_ has been broken, it’s only a matter of time before they struck again.

“The witnesses, the police, the press! There were so many witnesses to track down and deal with, maybe a few that we missed. I performed more Concilium in that one day than at Woodstock and Altamont combined. And then we had to deal with the police who arrived on the scene and everyone at the station who got a call about a homicide, and everyone in the club who called someone to talk about the crime, or, god forbid, tweeted about it. It was imperative that the press not become involved.” A single rolls down her wrinkled cheek. “How we succeeded, I’m still not entirely sure. It was too cruel, Mallory, too cruel, and on a night when we had reservations at Galatoires!”

Mallory isn’t sure that she understands her meaning. “So you revived the girl after you wiped everyone’s memory. What’s the problem? No one in those media vans outside has caught wind of it, or it would be splashed across every news channel in the country.”

“If only it were that simple! Alas, our troubles were just beginning.”

As soon as the breath of life returned to the dead girl, Cordelia could tell something was off. For starters, the look in her eyes was nothing like gratitude or relief. As to where she’d gone after she died, Heaven or Hell, she couldn’t remember, which isn’t all that unusual. More unusual was the split personality that she seemed to have developed in her second chance at life.  

About half the time, the exchange student acted like her normal self: a mischievous chatterbox always ready to make the other girls laugh. The rest of time, Gabrielle would get a desolate, faraway look in her eyes, her French-accented voice dropping an octave. If she spoke her native tongue during those times, she would use archaic expressions that no Francophone has used in over a century.

The older witches realized almost immediately that the girl hadn’t returned alone. Something had hitched a ride to the world of the living, and that something was now taunting them by playing dumb, refusing to admit it was even there.  

They all assumed it was a demon at first. Cordelia tried banishing it, as did Myrtle, and Queenie, and Zoe, and every other powerful witch of her acquaintance. Against their better judgment, they brought in a Catholic priest and a Rabbi, and they even flew in Bubbles McGee from a Hollywood shoot to attempt mind reading on the secretive intruder. It was no use. Whatever evil presence had insinuated itself into the inner recesses of Gabrielle’s mind, it went silent the moment that Bubbles stepped in the house. Impervious to exorcism, it wasn’t anything like the demons they were used to.

“That’s strange,” Mallory muses. “But Michael knows everything there is to know about demons. It’s a good thing he came down here, especially as he hates Cordelia’s guts and never has a nice thing to say about the coven. No offense.”

“None taken, my child. Cordelia’s conduct where that… _vile boy_ is concerned hasn’t been entirely spotless. When he came to us a few years ago, he was in a bad state. Bad enough to seek the help of the enemies that had just burnt his mother. I’m afraid that our beloved Supreme took advantage of that fact, and tried to push him harder on his road to redemption than he was ready for at the time. But it was a mistake from the start. Michael was always a square peg in a round hole, and not because he’s a man.”

“Kind of like me.”

“Nothing like you, Mallory. Stop identifying with the literal son of Satan. But I haven’t finished my story.”

Without proof that Gabrielle harbored an intruder in her body, and without the means to expel that intruder or even learn its name, the coven had little choice but to let the girl live her life as usual, even if they feared for the safety of the other girls. They watched her like hawks to make sure that she stayed out of trouble, and yet trouble has a way of finding her in the end.

They discovered Katalin at the bottom of the stairs, her left arm twisted out of its socket and her neck snapped along three vertebrae. The official story was that she’d tripped and fallen down the stairs at a bad angle after getting up in the middle of the night and roaming the house to shake off a nightmare. The truth was infinitely murkier.

“You think that Gabrielle pushed her down the stairs.”

“I don’t think it. I know it.”

“And when you performed Vitalum, she wasn’t back to her usual self because something else hitched a ride.”

“You guessed it.”

“But you still haven’t told me where Cordelia is. Is she hiding from the press?”

By this point, Myrtle is shedding large tears into a silken handkerchief and removing her cat-eye glasses to clear up a fogged lens.

“Cordelia is at the morgue with Zoe. They’ve been there all night, working hard to retrieve another student who was found dead in a ditch off the highway, mutilated beyond all recognition. To the police, she’s still Jane Doe.” 

“Witch hunters again?”

“We think so.”

Mallory doesn’t get a chance to hear the full story before she’s distracted by a familiar voice just outside the dining room. Slipping past the coven’s wards like a sly fox penetrating a well-guarded henhouse, Michael has revealed himself to the witches, and from what she’s hearing, they aren’t overly happy to see him.

With a flick of the wrist, Mallory reverses the silencing spell into an amplifying one. Just at that moment, a high-pitched scream rattles the walls, followed by the thud of a body falling to the floor; then comes the sound of pitter-pattering feet and a few girlish gasps as Michael orders all assembled to prevent the escape of whoever just made a run for the door.  

Myrtle rushes outside and Mallory follows closely behind. What she sees takes her breath away for a moment, but only a moment: Michael is standing in the middle of the entrance hall, looking calm and menacing at once, having caught not one but two teenage girls in his vice-like grip. He uses magic to restrain their limbs as he clamps his hands over their mouths so they can’t scream. Compared to the Antichrist’s superhuman strength, the girls are no more powerful than insects, yet still they struggle to free themselves, kicking their legs in the air.

Most of Robichaux’s student body has gathered in a circle around the triad, while two of Mallory’s old friends, Madison and Queenie, are watching the scene unfold from the top of the stairs.

“Hey, bitch!” Madison yells cheerily, too cheerily for the situation. “I see you brought your little pet Antichrist. At least he’s making himself useful, for once.”

_Bitch, he saved you from your personal hell of eternally folding towels at Sears_ , Mallory wants to yell back, but she bites her tongue. Madison likes to be provocative for no reason, spitting insults like it’s an Olympic sport. It’s just her way of saying hello

“Why are you manhandling my students?” Myrtle demands to know. “What’s going on here?”

Michael is still calmly restraining the girls, one of whom looks about ready to chew through his hand the second he loosens his grip on her face.

“Oh, nothing much,” he deadpans. “Just greeting some old family friends, who seem to have forgotten—” he presses down harder on that one girl’s mouth when she tries to grind her ass into his front, and pushes the other one down to the floor, stepping on her foot as warning to behave, “—who seem to have forgotten that they’re members of the aristocracy and are behaving like peasants.”

Irene Adler, the perfectly elegant woman in the expensive white coat that Mallory saw walking across the CNN stage to whisper confidential words into Cordelia’s ear, is here too, and she seems to know more about what Michael is doing than Mallory does. Irene is now walking across the hall with two chairs and a sling of heavy rope.

“Here are the items you requested,” she tells Michael in a perfectly calm voice matching his own. Working together in perfect harmony, they gag the two girls and bind them to the chairs, which Michael then nails to the floor with an invisible force.

“Ladies, please emulate your dear Ms Snow and show a little respect to your social betters. You’re in the presence of a countess and a baron.” His voice drips with sarcasm as he addresses the student body of Miss Robichaux’s—a body that is presently hanging onto his every word and drinking in the rare sight of a man in the school.

And _what_ a man he is. Michael’s black suit is cut to perfection over his tall and muscular frame, and his golden curls bounce as his strong hands work to physically restrain the two girls. His aquamarine eyes flash with the promise of punishment, while his angelic face glows with righteous indignation, taunting the intruders hidden in the innocent bodies.

“Welcome back to the world of the living, Elizabeth Báthory, but don’t get too comfortable,” he tells the Hungarian exchange student. “We’ll have you back in your personal hell in no time so you can break mirrors for the rest of eternity, with no blood of virgins to rejuvenate your aging skin.”

Cries of astonishment resound through the hall. One girl runs up the stairs in confusion. Someone cackles from the top of the stairway as she passes—Madison. For a person who spent four years in Hell, she could have a little more empathy, Mallory thinks, even for Elizabeth Báthory, the most prolific female serial killer of all time.

The evil soul that is presently infesting Katalin Szabó is staring daggers at Michael, but he appears unaffected. He walks around the girl slowly, theatrically, with his hands behind his back, savoring the drama of the reveal. Careful to avoid her snapping teeth, he removes her gag to give her a chance to speak, maybe even plead her case. The first thing that she does is spit on him. It lands on the lapel of his tailored black suit.

“Your Father saw my talent and released me from my personal hell decades ago,” Elizabeth replies in heavily accented yet perfectly fluent English. “Praise be to Satan

Briefly, Mallory wonders if they have Rosetta Stone in Hell. Where are all these damned souls picking up languages? Madison came back speaking fluent Mandarin.  

“And as for you, prodigal son,” Elizabeth continues, looking Michael up and down with a sneer, in response to which he only smiles, “you had more natural-born talent than any of us, and what did you do? You wasted it. You are the single greatest disappointment your Father has ever known, and he knows what it’s like to be cast out of Heaven—”   

“Enough!” shouts Myrtle and hits the girl with a silencing spell, and not because she wishes to spare the Antichrist some well-earned verbal abuse. No, she’s more concerned about Katalin, the girl locked inside her own body as the entity gears up to spit the foulest curses known to humankind through her lamb’s mouth. “Don’t keep us in suspense any longer. Who’s hiding in Gabrielle?”

Michael ignores Myrtle and stares at Elizabeth with the kind of gimlet-eyed intensity that would set a lesser woman on fire.

“I need you to let Katalin breathe. You’re coiled around her soul like a boa constrictor around a small mammal, squeezing the light out of it. If you don’t let her breathe, I _will_ burn your soul out of existence the second I manage to get you out of that body.”

Something like mortal terror flashes in the possessed girl’s face. She does what Michael orders. Her eyes roll back in her head and when they complete their revolution there’s a clarity in them that is all Katalin.

Elizabeth has crawled back into her mental hidey hole, at least for the time being. 

The French exchange student looks completely unaffected by the troubles of her companion. She’s not even struggling in her bonds. This time, Michael removes the gag before he reveals the identity of the second evil soul. Gabrielle herself doesn’t speak.

“This one is a baron. Six hundred years ago he was a companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc, but it wasn’t his military career that got him sent to Hell’s hottest circle.”

He bends down to look at the girl in the eye. A sly grin slowly spreads across her childish face.  

“Gilles de Rais, tell them what you did to all those children in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. Boys, girls… it didn’t matter what they were to the good baron, it only mattered that they suffered and died by the hundreds…”

“Oh my god,” gasps Queenie. Some of the younger girls are crying now, rocking back and forth and clutching each other for dear life. One is puking into a nearby trash can.

Irene is the first to speak. “How do we get rid of them and free the girls?”

_We?_ Mallory thinks. Now it’s ‘we’?

This Irene may be an uber-competent lawyer or crisis manager or whatever she calls herself, but she’s no witch, and neither is she an ordained priest. She won’t be banishing anything anytime soon, and if she has any humility at all, she will move out of the way and leave the demonology to the professionals.

Her very presence in the school is like a toxin in the air that Mallory breathes. It doesn’t help that Irene is even more beautiful in pderson than she was on television.

And then there’s the added problem of not dealing with demons that are bound to follow certain rules when they travel to the terrestrial realm. Mallory has never heard of a human soul attaching itself to another human soul before, and she doesn’t have the first clue about how to dislodge the intruder.

Before Michael has a chance to explain how he plans to free the girls, his head shoots up, as if he’s listening for something that no one else hears.

“What is it?” Irene demands to know right away. It’s like she’s usurped Mallory’s place at his side, and Mallory can’t stand it. 

“A powerful presence,” he replies. “Cordelia’s here.”

It takes a few minutes for Cordelia and Zoe to appear at Miss Robichaux’s, though Michael has sensed their approach from a distance. In those few minutes, Myrtle banishes all the students upstairs and beckons Madison and Queenie to follow. The albino bodyguards emerge out of the woodwork to carry the possessed girls back to the bedroom they share, where they secure them to their beds so there’s not even the slightest possibility of escape. The three witches then cast the requisite spells to prevent the girls from leaving the room, and Elizabeth Báthory and Gilles de Rais from manifesting in their minds unless they are summoned.

Meanwhile, Mallory is left downstairs with Michael and Irene. For a second or two, it’s awkward as fuck.

The other woman is the first to break the silence as she extends a beautifully manicured hand to Mallory. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Irene.”

While she’d rather not touch her hand, Mallory doesn’t want to look uncivilized and so she leans into the handshake. It’s too firm. Irene must be aware of the distrust that flickers in her eyes because, the second that Cordelia transmutes into the hallway with Zoe and a third, unknown witch in tow, she leans into Mallory’s ear and whispers, much like she whispered into Cordelia’s on TV: “I’m not the one you should be worried about.”

“Excuse me?” Mallory’s mind reels at this latest indignity. Irene says nothing more and only looks from her to the newly arrived Supreme and then back to her, smirking like some kind of fatal woman from a _film noir_.

Lost in thought, working out some difficult problem in his head, Michael pays no attention to their exchange. When Cordelia appears, however, his manner changes completely. Whereas a few moments before he was in total control of the environment and all the people in it, Cordelia’s very presence seems to have knocked all the arrogance out of him. He shrinks from his great height and practically hangs his golden head in shame, assuming a deferential, even submissive pose before the same woman that he ran from a few years ago and now claims to hate.   

Mallory has no time to interpret the change in Michael in light of what Irene just whispered in her ear before Zoe calls out her name and Cordelia greets her with a warm smile. Neither witch acknowledges Michael’s presence in any way, though they don’t look particularly surprised to see him.

Mallory’s old friend doesn’t rush to hug her straight away, not before she helps Cordelia to gently lay down the third witch on the nearest rug. The girl is clearly alive and breathing, yet so ashen-skinned and blue-lipped that she resembles a corpse, wrapped up in the blue sheet they put on them the morgue. Her face glistens with a substance that makes Mallory think of amniotic fluid; it looks somehow new, as if the top layer of skin was freshly applied through some magical intervention. That must be what happened, Mallory reflects, if the girl was too mutilated to be identified by police.  

When Zoe throws her arms around her, Mallory notices that her hands are covered in clay.  So are Cordelia’s.

Irene goes to the Supreme. “Were you seen by reporters?”

She shakes her head. “No, and they won’t know their ‘Jane Doe’ is missing down at the morgue. That’s why it took us so long. We had to reconstruct her face and much of her body, and then we copied her in clay and enchanted it to appear like her corpse.”

Michael is still silent, his head bowed in a peculiar sign of respect. Other than the time he returned from Hell and was too weak to stand, Mallory has only ever seen his dominant side, and so this reversal comes as a total surprise. It can’t possibly be a show of respect for Cordelia’s powers, which pale in comparison to what he’s capable of even at his weakest point. Then why is he acting this way?

When her roommate finally speaks, it’s in a small voice, as if he knows it will sound disrespectful and expects to be punished. “A golem? I suppose it’s not that hard to create one if it’s just meant to be dead.”

Cordelia stops what she’s doing and looks over at Michael for the first time. The second she does, he lowers his head in wordless apology.

_What the fuck is going on?_

Irene crouches next to the unconscious girl on the floor. “These witch hunters aren’t kidding around. What happens when they take one that you can’t revive? The eyes of the nation are on you, Cordelia. I’m not sure how long I can keep the wolves at bay.”

Michael lifts the girl’s head so that he can pry open one of her eyes. “This one’s clean,” he quickly says.

Then he does an unexpected thing—he turns to Mallory, who is feeling all but forgotten next to a potential rival that she knew about (Irene) and one that she never even suspected in her wildest dreams (Cordelia).   

“Quick, Mallory: why was there no evil soul attached to this girl when your Supreme revived her?”   

All eyes go to Mallory, but she’s drawing a blank.

“What do you mean? I’d have to know how they’ve been attaching themselves to witches that are revived through Vitalum, which I’ve never heard of happening before.”

Then it suddenly dawns on her, the only possible reason.

“Wait, it’s because the other two performed Descensum and this one didn’t. She’s too young to attempt something so dangerous, and not bold enough do it in secret.”

“Excellent!” Michael looks genuinely delighted for the first time that day, and it feels like the proverbial storm clouds have parted and the sun is shining down on her. “You’re becoming really good at deduction.”

He turns back to Cordelia, whom he addresses a little more confidently now, no longer shrinking before her floral-clad majesty. “There is a ritual that can detach the souls from the girls and send them back to Hell where they belong, but it’s a complicated one and I will require your help.” He looks at Mallory. “And yours too.”  

The two witches nod in unison. For all the distrust that has built up between them, the reigning and future Supremes can collaborate on a ritual, especially when innocent souls hang in the balance.  

Irene says nothing. Magical rituals aren’t one of her many areas of competence. The lawyer slash publicist looks vaguely annoyed to be left out.

_Good._

 

****

Later that night, after Mallory has eaten dinner with her old friends and old enemies (Cordelia being the only witch that fits into the latter category, though she may be unaware of it), she finds herself wandering the upstairs corridor in a listless mood, making her way unconsciously towards the guest room where Michael is staying.

When she finds herself standing before his door without realizing how she got there, she feels a sudden upsurge of anger with no immediate cause that nearly brings tears to her eyes and bile into her throat.  

She knocks once, twice, three times in quick succession. He doesn’t answer.

“Michael, I know you’re in there, awake.” Her voice is laced with irritation. “Don’t ignore me.”

Finally she hears footsteps nearing the door. It opens to reveal a pair of sleepy cerulean eyes and a tousled head of blonde curls fresh from the shower, tinted a darker shade than usual by the water that still clings to them.

“Come in.” Even his voice is weary. “What’s the problem now?”

The anger inside Mallory that was content to simmer lowly a few moments ago is now reaching its boiling point. Storm clouds gather on the horizon of her mind’s eye as she looks Michael up and down, taking in his heavy-lidded gaze (heavy with indifference towards her, she supposes) and his black satin pajamas, which are little “dressier” than he would normally wear in their shared apartment, as if he’s expecting a late-night visitor.

_Which_ visitor, Mallory wonders. Will it be the beautiful publicist that speaks to Michael like an equal even though she’s only human and endowed with no powers to speak of? Or will it be the Supreme witch, a woman twice Michael’s age whom he claims to despise for a myriad reasons, and yet, once he sees her in person, is practically down on his hands and knees to kiss her undeserving boots?

“You know what the problem is, Michael, or rather, what the problems _are_. There are two of them. Their names are Irene and Cordelia.”

Sitting on the edge of his bed next to his open suitcase, Michael furrows his brow and runs a hand through his wet hair in exasperation.

“What’s gotten into you lately? Maybe _you_ need an exorcism, Mallory, have you considered that? There’s nothing going on between me and either of the women you just mentioned.”

“I don’t believe you. Prove it.”

The river of anger inside of her flows fiercely enough to break through any dam in its path, flooding the shore and submerging whole cities in its wake.  

“What do you want me to prove, exactly? That I didn’t do anything?”

He rises to his feet, looking more alert now than when he opened the door. There is a faint spark in those depthless eyes, a blue flame burning improbably in the heart of an alpine glacier.

Mallory walks up to him, unintimidated, even though she only reaches as far as his chest.

“Maybe there’s nothing going on being you and Irene. I can believe that. But what I can’t believe is that nothing happened between you and Cordelia during your short stay with the coven a few years ago. I could see it, Michael,” she spits, disgusted. “The lowered eyes. The servile pose. The respectful tone of voice. The desire to please that wretched, pathetic woman who doesn’t deserve an ounce of your respect, not after what she does to her ‘dear girls,’ inviting them to take a test that could cost their immortal souls, not after what she did to _your_ mother, burning her—”  

“Be quiet,” he grits out, eyes flashing dangerously at this mention of the late Ms Mead. His self-control is wavering, threatening to snap, and she’s dancing on the edge of it. “You’re lost, Mallory, lost to the green-eyed monster. Stop before you say something you truly regret.”

“No,” she shouts, testing his limits. “I won’t stop. Not before you tell me what happened between you and ‘my’ Supreme. Even if it’s all in the past.”

She can feel the infernal energy crackling all around Michael, licking like cold flames at her skin. He draws her in with his dark magnetism, even if his intention is to repulse her, keep her at a safe distance.

Finally, after many moments spent looking deep into her eyes, boring straight into her soul with all the gentleness of a diamond drill bit, Michael seems to rethink his position. He doesn’t look ready to talk, not yet, but he doesn’t look like he wants to lie either.

“It wasn’t sexual,” is all he says.

Mallory can’t believe what she’s hearing. The nerve of this asswipe. She’s surprised that his nose doesn’t immediately grow to the other end of the room right before her eyes—that’s how much she believes him.

“Not sexual? _What_ wasn’t sexual exactly?”

He looks chastened, even vaguely ashamed to be talking about this. “What Cordelia did to me when she agreed to help me. It was just punishment. She wanted me to learn the error of my ways. To relinquish control. To become a better person.”

This is too much. It’s a wonder to Mallory that she’s still standing. She should be laid out on the floor now, struck dead by the force and transparency of his falsehoods. She realizes there might be a way to draw him out, trap him in his web of lies.

“If it was all above board, Michael, it should be easy enough to prove. Do to me what she did to you.” She smiles tauntingly, daring him to deny her this very reasonable request. “It should be safe enough, between friends. _If_ it wasn’t sexual.”  

Michael wasn’t expecting that. He regards her for a few seconds with genuine despair clouding his beautiful, clear eyes; then he closes them tightly and grits out a tentative “yes” against his better judgment.

He walks back to the bed where he rummages through his suitcase for a while, and when he finds the thing that he’s looking for, he hides it behind his back and turns around to face her.

She can’t help but notice that his plush lips are still pink from the hot shower as they curve into a smile, and not the friendly kind of smile either. No, it’s the kind that promises words that cut like a blade and humiliations as yet undreamt of.  

“You know, Mallory, now that I think about it… I think you _could_ benefit from a little punishment yourself now and then.”

He drops the sinister smile and brings out the object he just took from the suitcase. Mallory’s head spins when she sees it. Why on earth he would have THAT in his suitcase, she doesn’t have the first clue—unless he planned to give it to Cordelia to use on him, but that can’t possibly—

“Don’t be ridiculous. It was always meant for you.”

The riding crop is long and black, with a beautifully woven leather handle and a tiny strip of leather at the tip.

When Michael notices her staring at the tip, he cracks it loudly against his thigh, once, twice, barely registering on his face what Mallory imagines must be a sharp pain.

“Yes, you would be right about that. The smaller this little bit of leather is, the harder the strike. Now get on your hands and knees.”

“W-w-what?” She swallows as it finally hits her that this is really happening. “I’m not—”

“You said you wanted to know how Cordelia punished me. Well, I’m granting your wish. Get down and I’ll prove to you that it wasn’t sexual. You don’t even have to remove your clothes.”

She does as she’s told, feeling the carpet burn her palms as she finds a relatively comfortable position. The knowledge that Michael has walked around her and now stands facing her ass makes her cheeks burn from acute humiliation. Yet she doesn’t move from her position.

“Michael, this is more than a little ridiculous. What you’re talking about is impact play, which is very much a sexual act, clothes or no—ow!”

She feels the first strike on her ass keenly, even through the barrier of her jeans, especially as it comes with no warning.

The pinpricks of shame only get worse as she grits her teeth and bears the pain of an act that is only happening because she requested it, feeling like she’d beaten her roommate at his own game.

But Michael was too clever by half, and he doesn’t deliver the second strike when Mallory is expecting it; all he does is run the full length of the crop along the crease of her ass cheeks, then lightly over the smarting, ultra-sensitized skin of her ass.

“If Cordelia did this to you when you were under her care, then she’s definitely—a-a-ah! Shit! Fuck!”

The strikes are coming swifter and harder now, punctuated by the taunting caress of his crop against her reddened bottom. Michael isn’t kidding around.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about whole experience is the flickering of the lights every time his weapon prepares to connect with Mallory’s ass. Literal darkness seems to descend on the room as he raises the crop, as if the sheer force of his concentration has leeched all the electricity from the walls and every device, and when he lowers the crop the lightbulbs go on again.

Her voice sounds velvety and his breath feels hot against her neck as he leans over her, as if to ask whether she’d like him to stop. He doesn’t.

“We didn’t even decide on a safe word, Michael. Isn’t that common practice for this kind of—oww, that was a hard one! Evil motherfucker.”

“Jealous little witch-bitches don’t get a safe word,” he replies half-jovially, then seems to reconsider. “Fine, your safe word is ‘Gotterdammerung.’”

It’s the title of the Wagner opera they saw a few months ago, but he can’t possibly be serious because that word is much too long and complicated and German—

“Too bad! You think Cordelia gave me a safe word when she punished me for all my transgressions? No such privilege for the devil’s son. Now stop fidgeting and get stick your perky little ass out for the next one.”

Even as tears pours down her cheeks and fall on the rug that she bunches up with her fingernails as she takes the relentless strikes, she’s loving every second of her punishment. Who knew that acting like a brat and insisting that he alleviate her jealous suspicions would put Michael exactly where she wanted him, closer and closer, she hopes, to admitting his feelings and leaning into his sexual and romantic urges? If _that_ is what’s happening here. Or maybe he’s just punishing her for the hell of it, giving in to his more Satanic instincts, and with no intention of letting her peer into that complicated heart of his.  

With no warning—when does he ever warn her of anything?—Michael is unbuttoning her jeans and pulling them down to her knees along with her cotton panties, which are soaked at the front, to no one’s surprise.

Admiring the angry red streaks crisscrossing her ass, he runs a single large hand over the ultra-sensitive flesh, sending sparks down Mallory’s spine with every new inch of skin that he touches. She doesn’t dare to speak, or move. She only revels in his rare and much desired caress.

“Beautiful,” he mutters. “Had I known you were so responsive to corporal punishment, I might have administered a few warning strikes when you were whining about being neglected after the opera. That would have shut you right up.”

She can hear his breath hitching in his chest as he keeps touching the skin he just disciplined to within an inch of its life. The electricity is humming audibly in the walls now, the lights flickering lowly at a third of their usual capacity. They go out altogether at the moment that he lowers his face to her dripping heat and inhales her musky scent deeply, letting out a wistful, drawn-out sigh.

Careful not to startle her, his inserts a single ringer finger into her cunt, first marveling at its tightness and then at the copious juices that drip down his hand when he removes it.

“Mmmm, you taste even better than you smell, Mallory…”

She whines as she feels the same finger play along the edge of her folds, joined by a second as it spreads around her wetness and dips back inside her burning core, curving expertly to find that spongy spot in her inner walls that will make her dissolve…

_Now_ it’s sexual.

 

****

Meanwhile, two witches sit in the kitchen downstairs, watching the lights flicker all around them.  

“Girl, they’re not fucking, I’m telling you! They’re just friends, and partners in solving magical crime, as dumb as that sounds.”

Madison smiles as she relights her cigarette on the miniature fireball hovering in the palm of her hand. “As if anyone believes _that_.”

Queenie waves away the smoke floating in her direction. She lets her friend smoke because of the stressful day that she’s had—the stressful day that _everyone_ in this house has had.

“I always knew that goodie-goodie bitch was secretly freaky. You simply don’t move in with the Antichrist just to knit sweaters and play Sudoku all by your lonesome. I mean, _come on_. Michael spent a couple of months here, and he even saved you from the Hotel Cortez while he was still—” she searches for the right term, “—under the influence of his Father. Even your cynical ass has to admit he’s a total snack.”

“A snack he may be, but it’s the kind that you love to eat in the moment, then later it makes you sick to your stomach. Like a Snowball.” 

“Oh, please. Michael is nothing like a processed dessert. He’s a ten course meal at Galatoires.”

Queenie flashes her friend a look of disgust. “I don’t know what’s happening up there, but they’re definitely not fucking.”

Madison looks like she’s pondering whether to go upstairs and join them, then decides against it. The lights are still flickering on and off in the kitchen, which is directly below Michael’s room.

“Did you know that we made plans to see that Delongpre movie when I went to New York and she blew me off at the last minute? Said something about helping Michael with an investigation. Yeah right! Later I heard they went to the opera the same night, and I bet they fucked there too, right in his private box as the fat lady sang.” 

Queenie glares at her ex-movie star friend. “Or maybe Mal didn’t want to spend her evening with a skinny bitch who’s _still_ bitter about Emma Watson getting all the good roles.”

“Whatever. Everyone knows I would have been a much better Hermione. I mean, I practically _am_ Hermione in real life. Emma wishes.”

The lights are still flickering rhythmically, but not at the pace of the imagined fucking. They are spaced too far apart, for one, but Madison doesn’t know about the riding crop.

“At the rate those two freaks are going at it, they’re going to open a portal to another dimension just from the combined effort of their humping. And I, for one, don’t want to be around when that happens. Four years in Hell was more than enough for me.”

Madison may be a terrible actress but she’s really getting into the role of jealous friend.

“I bet when he fucks her, her dumb head spins around while her eyes turn pitch black and she starts gurgling in tongues—”

“Gurgling? What the fuck are you on, Mads? Shit.”

“It’s Hell, bitch. They have their own language down there, and it kind of sounds like a cat being water-boarded. You think those motherfuckers speak Latin to each other like Victorian altar boys? Anyway, back to Mallory and Michael… I bet she’s all like, ‘give it to me, demon daddy, fuck me harder, impale me on your eight-inch—”

“Stop! You’re being so gross today.” Queenie gives her a pitying glance. “You _do_ know that envy’s a deadly sin. If you don’t want to go back to Hell, you may want to lay off the vodka.”

She picks up the bottle on the table and replaces it in the cabinet with all the other bottles, most half empty. Madison takes this as her cue to extinguish her cigarette and go upstairs to investigate and perhaps put a stop to the potentially Hell-conjuring bedroom rituals that she imagines are occurring there. 

_The thirst is real_ , Queenie thinks.

“I heard that!” Her friend yells from the hallway.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elizabeth Bathory and Gilles de Rais are real historical figures, two of the worst serial killers of all time.


	7. A Scandal in New Orleans (Part 3 of 4)

Giving up control takes Mallory to outer space, where she floats in the velvety darkness of an infinite void, weightless and infinitely small. There is no up and no in that void, no gravity to bind her to the ground, no sun towards which to crane her head. There is only her body and the point of connection from which everything else radiates: the place where he touches her.

If she knew earlier how easy it would be, letting Michael dominate her so completely, letting him dictate what she experiences and when she experiences it and how, she would have given up control months ago.

Maybe then she would have spared herself the pain of his coldness when she pushed him too hard and too suddenly to accept the new feelings that rattled him to the core of his being.

Or maybe not.

A knock at the door brings her back down to Earth.

“Hey, is everything alright in there? Are your lights out too?”

It’s Madison. Mallory’s mouth is so dry and her brains so scrambled with sensation that she’s amazed when fully formed English words come out of her mouth.

“No, we’re good! But thanks for asking!”

Elbows and knees digging into the carpet, she does her best to move as little as possible, lest she displease the strict disciplinarian whose clever fingers are doing their devilish work in her burning, needy core—caressing, pumping, curving, reaching, and discovering new triggers of ecstasy that make her momentarily ashamed at how little she understood her own anatomy.

If she moves even a little bit, Michael might withdraw his hand from where she needs it most and return to administering rough smacks on her raw behind with his riding crop. So she stays where she is. In reality, however, it’s Michael who is holding her up with his magic, as without the extra support, Mallory would slide down to the floor in a pulsating heap of nerves and hormones.

Madison, bless her black little heart, isn’t going anywhere. She tries for seduction, yet her voice has never sounded whinier.

“Are you sure that you two don’t need a hand with anything?”

“N-no, we, uh, we have all the hands that we— _fuck_ —that we need.”

Michael warns her to stay put without saying a word. Two fingers are buried in her cunt up to the knuckles, chunky rings and all, and their movement triggers seismic events in her core, bombarding her field of vision with falling stars.

When he put away the riding crop, he forbade her to cum until he gives his permission. It’s all part of their game of control and surrender, and the game is so pleasurable that she is doing her best to obey. Mallory is a student of Freud and so she knows that the stricter the rules, the sweeter the release. Yet she can do little to stop her walls from contracting around the crudely pumping digits as her second orgasm starts to build from the pit of her stomach, threatening to be even more mind-shattering than the first.

Her friend still lingers outside, unable to take a hint.

“Are you absolutely sure? Is Michael capable of speaking for himself or has the cat got his tongue?”

“Go away, Madison. We’re having a private conversation,” Michael commands through the door, but he’s giving the game away with his heavy breathing.

“Telepathically? Or in sign language? Because I don’t hear any words.” Madison sounds so disappointed. “Whatever, you dumb whores. Suit yourselves. Just so you know, your ‘private conversation’ blew out all the light bulbs in the kitchen.”

Mallory doesn’t hear the sound of Madison’s retreating footsteps as Michael brings his other hand to her clit and pulls back the hood so he can ghost a single finger over the exposed bundle of nerves that reminds him of a delicate pink rosebud. It’s too rough, too direct. She can’t bear it. She jerks away from his touch, but only succeeds in impaling herself more deeply on the fingers that are working her cunt. It’s that unintentional move that undoes her.

She doesn’t ask his permission before she goes over the edge. She doesn’t even realize that she’s about to cum again, and cum harder than before.

_Oh, fuck._

She briefly wonders if Michael will punish her as the orgasm sends aftershocks through her every limb, suffusing her every cell with pure lassitude in the wake of a perfect pleasure.

She hears him chuckle in the dark as she collapses on the rug, knees and elbows rubbed raw from the friction. She barely feels the discomfort. The dopamine is still running through her veins and keeping her in that blissed-out state where it’s hard to form coherent thoughts.

It’s almost embarrassing, how little it took for her to unravel completely. Nothing more than a verbal command. They hadn’t spoken about any of it beforehand, and yet she knew, by instinct, what she wanted from him and how to ask for it. 

Crumpled on the floor, she lifts her arm and begins to feel around blindly in the dark until she finds Michael’s thigh. Quickly, before he has a chance to react, she slides her hand between his legs and traces the outline of his cock as it strains through his pants.

He pulls away. All the lights turn back on at once. She blinks.  

“Put your jeans back on, Mallory. Now.”

It’s another command, but one that she’s less inclined to obey. They’ve played that game already. Now they’re playing another, and this time she’s making the rules.

“No, I’m more comfortable like this.”

With a long sigh, Michael runs a hand through his messy hair. Gone is the perfect center parting that she’s so used to seeing; in its stead is a messy halo of golden curls that remind her of Medusa’s snakes. A few cling damply to his forehead and neck. Heavy-lidded, his baby blues are shadowed with lust.

“If you’re going to behave like a child, don’t be surprised when you get treated like one,” he tells her in a raspy voice. Then he rises to his feet, clearly wondering what to do with her next.

She likes the feeling of being helpless, or imagining she’s helpless, as Michael towers over her prone form. Of being infinitely small.

Her body refuses to move, whether out of spite or simply because she’s enjoying the post-orgasmic indolence.

She braces for another sharp smack on her bare ass, which is smarting from the many strokes he gave her with his riding crop. She felt every stroke, even through a layer of stretchy denim.

Nothing like that happens, however. Instead, Michael bends down to where she lays and takes her ass in his hands, planting a kiss in the center of each cheek. Then he picks her up off the floor, cradling her head on his shoulder as he carries her over to the narrow bed, amused by the way her limbs have gone slack like a ragdoll’s.

He deposits her on her back and slips her panties back over her thighs before pulling up her jeans. Once she’s clothed, he gets into bed next to her and crosses his hands over his chest, proceeding to stare at the ceiling with an unreadable expression on his face.

“What is it?” Mallory admires his perfect profile from the kind of close angle he never normally grants her. “What are you thinking about?”

He doesn’t answer for a while. Slowly, he turns on his side and folds his hands under his cheek so they are lying practically nose to nose. He reaches over to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and her heart nearly stops at the unexpected intimacy of the gesture.

How long will it last, this time?

Predictably, he pulls back at the exact moment that she leans into his touch. It’s the same game of push-pull they always play, and yet the look in Michael’s luminous eyes isn’t precisely that of regret. She won’t realize until later why they are luminous—that they are reflecting _her_ light, absorbing the glow of _her_ sun. That’s how he perceives her.

Michael clearly wants intimacy, but he doesn’t feel that it’s the devil’s due, and so he pulls back from the brink of emotional commitment like he’s been caught with his grubby hand on something so pure that the lightest touch from a creature like him soils it forever.

“I’m lost,” is all he says.

She doesn’t understand it at first.

“Lost how? Lost, as in you don’t know what to do with your life? Or lost like a soul is lost, damned to eternity in Hell? Because I assure you, Michael, you’re not predestined for—”

He places a single finger on her lips to stop the silly stream of consoling words. She watches as his eyes travel from her stopped lips up to the creases that form on her forehead as she frowns and then back down to the dried tracks on her cheeks where tears were streaming only minutes before. It’s like he’s trying to commit every line of her face to memory before the universe comes to its senses and separates them.

“You know, Mal, the doorman at the Satanic Church in downtown LA used to ask everyone the same question: ‘Are you lost?’ It was their open sesame.”

She didn’t know that. It hurts her soul to see him is so much distress, but there’s a darker motivation there too, a more selfish one—it hurts her ego that she hasn’t made enough of a positive difference in his life.

If anything, her very proximity is a never-ending torment for a reformed Antichrist in constant danger of a relapse.

What does Michael think will happen if he simply claims the thing that he believes he can’t have? That the world will crack in half? That the skies will darken with soot and waters turn the color of blood?  

“I wandered into that wretched place after your coven burnt my Ms Mead, but first I spent four days alone in the wilderness. Four days of being ignored by my Father and beset by illusions, each one more terrifying than the last. The truth is that I’m more lost now than I was back then, on the worst day of my life. How can that be?”

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating, Michael. It’s been a stressful few months for you. I’ve been a major cause of that.”

“What?” He rises a little off the bed, looming over her with a questioning look that quickly turns into outrage. “You? I’m the one who was horrible to you, treating you with unforgivable carelessness. It’s a miracle that you even put up with me. If I were you, I would have left me months ago.”

Mallory meets his gaze head on, undaunted by the flash of anger in those animate shards of ice.

“Was that your intention, Michael? To behave so badly that you drove me away?”  

“I wasn't—”

“To force _me_ to walk out of _your_ life because you were too chickenshit to do it yourself?”

“You misunderstood me—”

“I understood you perfectly.”

A second ago she was feeling sorry for him, sorry to the point of apologizing when she did nothing wrong. Now, however, she remembers all the indignities to which he’s subjected her in the last few months, all the emotional whiplash caused by his erratic behavior, his blowing hot one minute and cold the next with no rhyme or reason.

And who could forget the newest indignity: the shock of what he’d done with Cordelia in the past, even if he claimed, foolishly, that it wasn’t sexual?

Her accusatory tone takes the wind out of his sails completely. He collapses back next to her and shuts his eyes tight, like a small child trying to escape the monster under his bed by imagining it out of existence.

It’s cruel, she knows, to flash her sharpened teeth when he’s showing his underbelly, but flash her teeth she must, for the greater good, to drag everything out into the light.

Michael will want to flee this confrontation. He’ll try to crawl back into that dark crevasse that he thinks of as his emotional refuge, and that’s why it’s essential to trap him while he’s out in the open.

“If you only knew how it feels to know that…”

“Know what, Michael?”

But he doesn’t finish his sentence. Mallory gets the distinct impression that he’s fighting a fresh wave of despair in an ocean of pain.

“Know _what_?”

He does something that takes her aback. His right hand brushes her left one on the coverlet before his larger fingers entwine with hers and squeeze tightly, once, twice, his thumb rubbing small circles into her clammy palm. Although the touch isn’t meant to be erotic, it sends an electrical bolt up her damp back and lights up her spinal cord like a Christmas tree.

When he speaks, his voice is smaller than she’s ever heard it. It’s not a man’s voice but a boy’s.

“I’m sorry.”

She relents, heated blood cooling in her veins.

“Michael, I _may_ have been too harsh—”

“No! I deserved it. If anything, you were too kind.”

He turns back around to face her and brings his other hand up to her face to caress her cheek with an infinite tenderness, and an infinite sadness. She melts into the hand, and lo and behold, this time he doesn’t pull away or take his eyes off hers. Instead, he holds her gaze, probing its depths, searching for something, but what?

She thinks she know what’s eating him from the inside.

It’s the problem of predestination.

In his darkest moments, Michael likes to talk about what he’s predestined to become. More disconcertingly, he likes to talk about his past crimes, as if he’s sitting in a confessional booth and Mallory is the priest. Or he’s lying on her couch and she’s the psychoanalyst.

These conversations always leave her feeling unsettled, even though she knows that he’s no longer that person. Michael is fighting his natural instincts tooth and nail as he works to make the world a better place. Yet he’s still convinced that he’s innately evil and that, if left to his own devices, he’ll end the world. In the best case scenario, the witches will destroy him before he succeeds.

“It could be you, Mallory, who destroys me and clears the field for another Antichrist,” he told her in the early days of their acquaintance, after subjecting her to that horrible story about how he gave the Black Dahlia a new smile. The excuse, she supposed, was that he’d been living in a hellmouth with the ghosts of his family and others, shunned and despised by all save one (Ben hadn’t given up on him, yet).

“It’ll never come to that,” she tried to reassure him but to no avail. On some level, Michael was still that lonely and unloved kid from the Murder House.

A week later, while they were sitting in the living room after a tiring case involving a haunted pet cemetery, he brought up his favorite subject again: souls that are born to be damned.

This time he was trying to convince her, in between furious drags from his e-cigarette and small sips of Turkish coffee, that Judas Iscariot was the true savior of humanity.

“Think about it, Mal. What’s a few hours on the cross next to an eternity of damnation and everlasting infamy as the paragon of greed and betrayal? Judas didn’t even want those thirty pieces of silver. He tried to return them when he heard they’d arrested the Nazarene, but it was too late by then. Gabriel had already whispered the order in his ear.”

“I thought it was his choice to betray Christ,” Mallory remembers saying as she watched Michael reverse his empty cup; he was waiting for the coffee grinds to slide down so he could read the future in their patterns. Mallory’s late grandmother, the one who could trace her lineage all the way back to Salem, was good at this sort of folk divination. She’d swear that it was more accurate than the standard rune stones, and Mallory had believed her.

“Of course it was Judas’s choice to betray the Nazarene. One of the twelve Apostles had to do it. Really, Mal, didn’t they teach you anything in Sunday school?” She remembers how he squinted at the patterns in the coffee grinds and frowned, evidently disliking what he saw in the cup. “Someone didn’t read the Gnostic gospels and it shows.”

It took her an embarrassingly long time to grasp the true import of his words.

“Wait, you’re trying to tell me that Judas made the ultimate sacrifice? Not Christ?”

“The Nazarene was never truly lost. How could he be? He knew that God would never betray his only begotten son, especially not after that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of despair on the cross. To mortify the flesh, that’s child’s play. But to mortify the spirit, to warp the soul beyond all recognition, to break it on the wheel of malevolence without being malevolent oneself… that takes real commitment.”

He was right about Jesus having his work cut out for him. It was nothing like the uphill climb that Michael himself faced each and every day—the constant temptation to sin and destroy all that is beautiful and vital and good and alive in the world, to grind it underfoot until nothing of it remained but dust, not even a memory of its purity. But he fought against his programming, and he did it without expecting a heavenly reward at the end of the fight.

Michael identifies with Judas because he believes that he, too, is damned. He knows that his Father will have the last laugh in the end. But as long as it’s Michael at the reins, the Apocalypse is on indefinite hiatus. The Cooperative hasn’t been allowed to operate since the Satanist trials, and the Church of Satan has had to burrow deeper into obscurity, driven underground by its own messiah.

Still, it doesn’t mean that Michael himself doesn’t relapse on occasion. Take his behavior a few weeks later when Mallory had gone on a date with a boy from her Introduction to Psychoanalysis class.

She wasn’t interested in the boy in the slightest. But she _was_ interested in making Michael jealous.

They made plans to visit the Storm King sculpture park in upstate New York. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in late October. The place was supposed to be romantic. The boy had described 500 acres of woodland turning all hues of red, yellow and orange, with massive steel sculptures dotting the autumnal landscape like derelict space craft or monuments to forgotten gods.

The only problem was they never arrived there. The moment that Mallory and her date got on the highway, accidents began to occur with alarming frequency.

About halfway into their drive, a sinkhole opened up in the middle of the interstate. It got so wide so quickly that it swallowed up a few cars before the highway patrol arrived to cordon off the road (luckily, no one was hurt).

Once they battled the gridlock, they drove into a freak patch of bad weather. The weather forecast had predicted clear skies without so much as a gust of wind marring the sunshine, and yet the closer they got to Storm King, the darker the storm clouds that gathered on the horizon.

And the clouds didn’t stay on the horizon for very long; soon they were right over their heads, pursuing the car like a meteorological manifestation of Mallory’s guilt.

 _Michael_ , she gritted her teeth as the rain poured down in opaque curtains, erasing their view of the road. _What did you do? What are you going to do next?_

The boy blinked in disbelief as hailstones the size of quail eggs began to pound the roof of his scrappy used Volvo. A sinkhole was one thing, but a sinkhole _and_ a rainstorm that came out of nowhere to hover over the car and disappeared just as quickly as it came? That was less like coincidence and more like the will of an angry god.  

Once the storm had passed and they drove to the nearest gas station for a much needed rest, there was one final surprise in store. The boy yelped as an enormous black snake slithered out from under his car seat and began to wrap around one of his legs. Mallory was on the verge of using her magic to remove the snake from the car but didn’t wish to alarm her date even more. Terrified, he already blamed her for all the mishaps. 

On her way back from the gas station bathroom, she saw that her classmate and his car were long gone. There was no sign of the snake either.

But—surprise, surprise—Michael was there, sitting behind the wheel of a red convertible with Baphomet decals, snakeskin-patterned black seats, and a dumb sticker that read “Judas Saves.”

Mallory fought the urge to slap him as he pushed open the passenger door and told her to get in. It was his car, he said, a gift from a member of the Cooperative while it was still operating.

“For fuck’s sake, Michael. Did you really have to do all that? People could’ve gotten hurt. And maybe I _liked_ Chris…”

Hearing the boy’s name spoken aloud wiped the smug grin right off his face. After that, it was like he was going through the motions as he turned the key in the ignition and hit the gas.

“Don’t lie. It doesn’t become you.”

“Or maybe I wanted to go see the sculptures at Storm King?”

“If you want to go to the park, I can turn around—”

“No," she half-yelled, feigning outrage. His obvious jealousy delighted her. “It’s ruined now, thanks to what you did.”

He was driving a little faster than was strictly necessary and cutting in front of other drivers at every opportunity. His blonde locks whipped angrily around his face, while his darkened eyes skittered between her and the road.

“Even if you liked that guy, which you don’t, he’s all wrong for you.”

“Chris? He wants to be a psychoanalyst.”

“A Jungian, Mallory.”

“What’s wrong with Carl Jung?”

“Everything,” he practically groaned as he hit the pedal to accelerate. “I didn’t take you for a gender essentialist.”

“I’m not. But going on a date is something that normal people my age do all the time. Do you even know what the word means? Normal?”

He didn’t take it as an insult. He knew that she loved it, was becoming addicted to it, in fact, all the abnormal stuff they got up to.

He spit on Carl Jung and yet he was the living personification of the Shadow archetype, at its darkest and densest.

“You’re right, Mallory. I should’ve let you go on your date with that sadsack Indiana Jones who can’t handle a little snake.”

“That snake wasn’t little.”

It took her a moment to figure out what felt so off about his outfit. While he looked elegant as usual in his black leather jacket worn over a black turtleneck and paired with black jeans, there were flecks of dried blood on his sleeve and more blood caught under his usually pristine fingernails.

That only meant one thing.

“Why is there blood on you? Did you murder someone before you came to get me?”

And if he had murdered someone, where did he find the time between opening a sinkhole in the highway and conjuring up a rainstorm to chase her car?

“Jesus Christ, I hope that no one died just so you could sabotage my—”

“Watch your language. The world doesn’t revolve around Mallory Watson and her little libido. And no one innocent got hurt. Let’s just leave it at that.”

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples hard, as if to jumpstart her deductive reasoning skills.

“No innocents? That wouldn’t be a problem, Michael, if you didn’t have an extremely narrow definition of the word ‘innocent.’ Who was it, that you killed? Tell me, or I’ll have to investigate myself.”

It wasn’t that hard to figure out in the end. All she had to do was turn on the news later that evening.

“At the UN General Assembly, Michael? Really? You couldn’t wait until, oh, I don’t know, he was on the toilet or in the shower or something?”

He said nothing for a while, only stared, stony-faced, into the dying embers of the fireplace. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded cracked and hollow, at odds with itself.

“Two reasons. I had to get his bodyguards too, and I had to send a message to any other ex-Coop members who were thinking of misbehaving. Old habits die hard.”

She dropped into the armchair opposite her roommate and briefly considered picking up his e-cig from the table and taking a nice, long drag. This was getting exhausting.

“Collateral damage? Sounds messy.”

“They weren’t innocent. They sold their souls when they entered his service. It was a prerequisite. My Father is recruiting again.”

And there it was.

His Father.

Recruiting.

The shadow that hung over Michael all those months ago still hangs over Michael today. It keeps him from opening up to her, from receiving all that she has to give, and give freely.

Flash forward to now, when Mallory is laying side by side with Michael in a small guestroom at Miss Robichaux’s, a place that she swore she would never visit again. Her flesh still vibrates from the intense combination of pleasure and pain dealt by his hands and riding crop. She barely even hears the words that come out of her mouth.

“Let me be your Judas, Michael.”

His startling eyes go wide.

“Excuse me? Are you saying you want to be my savior?”

But his astonishment vanishes as soon as he reflects on the unspoken meaning behind the metaphor.   

“No, absolutely not. There will be no talk of sacrifice. Don’t tempt fate by even thinking it.” His voice turns a few shades darker, dripping with menace with no particular target. “I will _never_ let anything bad happen to you, Mallory, not in a million years. I will keep you safe from harm even if I have to incinerate this whole wide world and all the other worlds in existence, all the heavens and all the hells.”

That’s a little hyperbolic, even for him, Mallory thinks. But her heart eats it right up, and her soul basks in the heat of his words after what feels like an Ice Age.

“What about Cordelia?”

“What about her?”

“Irene seems to think there’s a vibe between the two of you. Don’t lie to me, Michael. I saw the way you turned all timid in her presence, almost like you feared her.”

“I _do_ fear her, a little, still,” he admits, looking embarrassed, avoiding her eyes. “It’s not about who she is, Mal. It’s what she represents as Supreme, the mother of the coven, the strongest magical point on Earth. And it’s the wholesome kind of magic, nothing like my innate darkness.”

“Wait.” Mallory draws back from him for a second. “I’ll become Supreme some day, whether I want it or not. Does that mean that you’ll kneel to me when that happens? I’ll be nearly as strong as you.”

He looks perplexed for a moment before curving his finely shaped lips into a vaguely mocking smile, exposing a line of perfect teeth.

“Kneel before you? You, Mallory? Never.”

She’s relieved to hear it. That’s not the kind of dynamic she wants with him. Then she decides to take a risk. But how can it be a risk when he’s given her such a clear opening? How could Michael possibly deny the divine sustenance he craves with his whole starving soul?

Without saying a word, she leans forward to seek his lips. She gives him a moment to stop the kiss, to pull away like he always does (or nearly always) when there’s danger of true emotional closeness. He doesn’t stop her.

When their lips finally collide, it’s not like before, in the alley after the opera.

For once, this is exactly what it appears to be: a real, honest kiss, not a sublimation of violence, not a furious rejection of her emotional offering.

Mallory sighs into the plump softness of his mouth as opens for her, and she also relishes the slight scratchiness of his unshaven chin as she leans further in.

Both his hands are reaching for her face and holding her solidly in place as he swipes a tentative tongue against her lower lip to seek entry. He moans when she grants him that entry, so eager to know what she tastes like in all her most intimate places. But his pace is slower and more leisurely now, his intention being to savour every moment , and there’s not rush to consume like before, and yet—

—and yet.

 A moment of clarity breaks the spell and Mallory realizes where she is, where they both are: in the house of a woman they both love to hate, and in the midst of a case involving witch hunters rampaging around New Orleans and evil souls possessing the bodies of innocent young witches.

This is inappropriate.

“Michael?” She whispers as she finally manages to break away from the kiss. He whines like as their mouths detach, momentarily stricken at the loss of contact. A thread of saliva glistens between them like a reminder that, yes, this is definitely inappropriate.

“What, my sweetness?”

 _My sweetness_. Antichrist or not, he’ll need to be taught a lesson about proper terms of endearment. Later, when they solve the case.

“It feels kind of wrong to be doing this when there are two girls down the hall from us, strapped to their beds and possessed by souls so evil that even your Father would raise an eyebrow.”

He seems confused by her concern at first, then vaguely amused, as if remembering that she didn’t seem too bothered by that knowledge when she was cumming on his fingers and crying out from his strikes.

“Michael, I’m serious. Those girls are in trouble.”

“You’re right. We’re on a case and acting like horny teenagers. Wait…”

He appears to be listening for something all of a sudden, sensing the disturbance in the air that has yet to announce itself to the house at large.

“Someone new is here. A powerful witch.”

Mallory watches in horror as he grimaces in pain and nearly doubles over in bed from the force of what he’s suddenly sensing.

“Something evil?”

“No, the opposite. Her magic is purer than Cordelia’s, even though it’s weaker. It turned my stomach when I brought her back from her personal hell.”

Mallory hits upon the identity of the intruder, or visitor, right away. Who else could it be but Misty Day?

He nods with distaste. “She’s been here for a while now. I was too distracted to notice.”

This provokes a smile from Mallory, who is ecstatic to be the cause of that distraction, however naughty it makes her feel. The mischievous smile that answers her own is a glory to behold.

“That’s the effect you have on me, Mal.” He tightens his grip on her waist, a little reminder of his superior strength. “Just don’t expect me to kneel. Ever.”

 

*****

Madison stomps down the hallway in her platform heels, frustrated by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the two most annoying Supremes to ever pass the Seven Wonders in the history of the coven.

Mallory and Michael think they’re so different, such a fascinating play of contrasts with his edgelord and her flower crown bullshit, but they’re exactly the same. For one, neither can see the value of having Madison at their pathetic little bedroom party, which she’s pretty sure wasn’t all that exciting anyway, if she wasn’t invited.

She wonders if she should go and check on Gabrielle and Katalin, the two possessed girls confined to a room down the hall. The evil souls inside of them are dormant at the moment, suppressed by all the magic the coven can muster, and yet there’s something so eerie in the idea that a medieval killer who used to bathe in the blood of virgins hides inside Katalin, a girl that Madison caught stealing one of her luxury vegan bath bombs only a few days ago.

No, she thinks, better not check on those girls. Better grab another cig from her pocket and crack open the nearest window to release the smoke before throwing herself out of it.

She’s only joking, of course. The coven exasperated her even before the Vitalum scandal hit the news and had reporters and cameramen swarming the perimeter of the property. The media are her specialty, in a way. But Cordelia would probably strike her with some version of Avada Kedavra if she waltzed out there and gave them a piece of her mind. Well, she would pretend that was the reason she went in front of the cameras, but really it would be to pose for the paps because she’s certain there are more than a few of those vultures out there, disguised as the “serious” journalists. The only thing stopping her is the memory of the four years she spent in Hell, folding towels and listening to endless customer complaints in a Sears that never had any personal massagers in stock. 

When she goes back downstairs and peeks out the window to see if she can spot any of the known paps, Madison is surprised to find all the media vans gone, vanished without a trace. Does the national news cycle move _that_ quickly? Impossible. Myrtle must have cast a spell to disperse them.

The faint sound of women’s voices draws lures to the closed door of the dining room. Someone is in there with Cordelia; as she creeps closer to the door, she recognizes the voice as belonging to someone who has haunted her dreams for years on end. It’s the bitch she hit on the head with a brick, pushed into an open coffin, and buried in the cemetery—stupidly, so stupidly, because the Stevie Nicks wannabe had the wonder of resurgence and, like the Terminator, was never going to stop coming back.

Well. Maybe it’s not _all_ bad.

Madison remembers the enchanted mirror that she hung in the same room where Cordelia and Misty are talking right now—a mirror whose synchronized mate is sitting on her vanity table upstairs.

She didn’t plan to hang its enchanted mate there initially. No, it was intended to decorate the guestroom where Michael would be staying, but the evil motherfucker spotted it the moment he walked in and transmuted it back to its owner.

Well. Maybe she was right to put it in the dining room after all. With a new bounce in her step, Madison goes back upstairs to get the mirror and returns to the kitchen.

Queenie gives her a funny look. “Back already? Couldn’t entice them into a threesome? I knew you failed when the lights came back on.”

Madison puts the oval mirror on the table and licks her finger before dragging it around the rim. The surface ripples like a reflection in a clear pond before flicking to the interior the dining room like someone changed the channel.

“That’s odd. I didn’t hear Misty come in.” Queenie frowns as the reflection changes. “Wait, isn’t that the mirror from the guestroom where Michael is staying?”

“I tried to snoop, but he found it.”

When she told Queenie about her now failed plan, the other witch admired her commitment, calling it a new frontier of thirst. But Madison is undaunted. This outcome is even better, as now she gets to snoop on the clearly distracted Supreme as she meets with that gross bitch from the bayou.

“What’s going on between those two, anyway? I’m getting vibes.”

“No vibes. They’re just friends. But I suppose you wouldn’t know what that’s like, Mads, never having had a friend and all.”

“Shhh, I’m trying to eavesdrop.”

In full view of the enchanted mirror, the two witches are sitting at the table with her heads bowed and fingers interlaced. A quick look at Misty’s face reveals that she’s been crying for hours, as she’s looking more racoon-eyed than usual. There’s mud encrusted on her face and in her wavy blonde hair and—is that blood on her shirt?

Cordelia looks extremely concerned for her friend, to whom she extends a box of tissues. The bayou bitch waves it away like it’s some unnatural accoutrement of city life and wipes her snot on her shawl, which is black and embroidered with yellow roses. The Supreme doesn’t look grossed out by the gesture. Then Misty begins to speak in that thick Louisiana accent of hers.

“You know that I’ve surrounded myself with the white spirit light to protect me. Even if they put me down, I know how to bring myself back.”

“But who killed you?”

“That I can’t tell ya. The shot entered my back and then I fell in the mud. I didn’t see no one.”

Queenie gives Madison an accusatory look because she knows her unfortunate history with the swamp witch, but Madison just shrugs her skinny shoulders.

“It wasn’t me. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.”

Oddly, the voodoo witch believes her.

“Must be the witch hunters, then. Quick, someone call Marie Laveau. Did you know that she’s back from the dead and living in Brooklyn?”

Huh. That’s news to Madison.

“I suppose Michael is the one we have to thank for that.”

Cordelia is rubbing Misty’s back in an attempt to soothe her, but she’s getting more and more agitated by the second, and rambling in that backwoods twang of hers about how returning to life felt different this time around, nothing like the first time she brought herself back after some religious extremists burnt her alive.

Something is weighing on her soul like a millstone around the neck, she says, choking the ethereal light right out of her. Even the animals can feel it. The birds and frogs fell silent when she exited the hut, and the gators swam away when she touched the slime-green water.

Madison and Queenie know what’s coming.

“Oh, fuck,” they say in unison.

Like a trap springing open, the evil soul hiding behind the innocent one comes alive and takes control of the host, acting before it’s been fully unmasked. Through the mirror, the younger witches watch in helpless horror as Misty—who isn’t really Misty now—produces a slender knife from the velvet pouch slung around her waist and swipes it across Cordelia’s throat with lightning quickness, hugging the other woman close as blood spurts from her neck in a crimson geyser.

Before anyone can react, not-Misty is transmuting away from the house with the slumped body of her Supreme, and she’s taking Gabrielle and Katalin with her, as they will find out later. Nobody sees the girls disappear from their beds, with no Supreme magic to bind them to the room.

Upstairs, Mallory feels it, the moment that Cordelia’s life is snuffed out like a candle.

It feels like being thunderstruck and being drowned at the same time, all that power lighting up her veins and pressing on her windpipe before settling into every tissue and cell of her body like it was always meant to live there inside of her—and only her, no one else.

She turns to Michael, who stares like he’s seeing her for the first time. She speaks but the voice isn’t her own; it’s deeper, more assured, less afraid.

“Cordelia’s dead.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea that Judas, not Christ, was the real savior of humanity comes from a second-century Gnostic gospel written in Coptic. Jorge Luis Borges also wrote about it in “Three Versions of Judas” (1944). 
> 
> Michael calls Christ “the Nazarene” because that’s what Damien Thorn does in "Omen III: The Final Conflict." And we all know where he used to get his Antichrist advice. In that movie, which I watched as a kid, Sam Neill plays the grown Antichrist. Seeing Damien riding a horse while dressed as an English lord probably planted the seeds for the Antichrist fetish that I have now.
> 
> Storm King Art Center is a real sculpture park in Mountainville, NY. It’s a romantic place that would be perfect for a Millory date, with maybe some frolicking in fallen leaves. The park is featured on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show.
> 
> I'm not sorry for dissing Carl Jung because his psychoanalysis is reductive and perpetuates harmful ideas (i.e., the animus/anima thing only enforces the gender binary). Apologies to any Jungians out there. I know there are problems with Freud as well, but at least other analysts have built a useful foundation on his ideas.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who is reading.


	8. A Scandal in New Orleans (Part 4 of 4)

_Three hours before Cordelia’s death_

The new tenant of Misty Day’s body contemplates using a peg from the clothes line to plug her nose. Once you’re this deep in the bayou, the smell of wet earth and rotting wood and composting grass is everywhere, so it’s no better inside the tiny dilapidated shack than outside in the mosquito-infested swamp.

For the third time that day, fake Misty wonders about how her witchy host could stand it, living so far from civilization in a house that teeters perilously on stilts above the foulest, most stagnant water this side of Hell. Sheltered by a grove of enormous trees that resemble veiled brides with their branches hung with Spanish moss, the house was once a place of nature worship. Now it’s a temporary headquarters for the new “coven” of dead souls planning to cause mayhem on a massive scale—once their Master provides them with a plan, that is.

That’s just the problem. When Satan put fake Misty in charge, he didn’t give her an instruction manual.

“Hey, boss, what’s the wifi password?”

Samantha Crowe waves a hand in front of her face to get her attention. She’s surprised that there’s even a connection this far in the middle of nowhere.

Fake Misty is so mesmerized by the shiny black paint job on the other woman’s fingernails that she doesn’t even hear the question the first time around; neither does she notice the gigantic mosquito biting her cheek or the cottonmouth snake presently slithering across the wood floor. It takes her a moment to get inside the mental storehouse that the real Misty tries to keep beyond her reach, but once she’s in there, it’s easy to skim the password off the top of her consciousness. It would be harder to reach all the complex, emotional, messy stuff that forms the core of the witch’s personality, so she doesn’t even bother.

“The password is ‘Rhiannon.’ All lowercase.”

It’s Samantha’s turn to look confused when she types in the letters and nothing happens.

“What do you mean it’s not working? Did you type it in small letters?”

Samantha has been a disappointment from day one. The former cardinal of the Church of Satan was the only member of LaVey’s inner circle to escape the long arm of the law before the Satanist trials. Naturally, fake Misty assumed that she’d be smarter when she took her on as an assistant. But Sam has been near-useless. About the only useful thing she’s done is set up the technical system for the conference call that starts in five minutes.

“Are you sure it’s ‘Rihanna’?”

The name of the Barbadian beauty hangs heavy in the air.

“Rihanna? Did I say it was Rihanna?” The only sound that fake Misty can hear now is the amorous call of a Chorus frog in the distance, and it only enrages her more. “For fuck’s sake, Sam, you think this redneck hippie bitch even knows who that is? It’s R-h-i-a-n-n-o-n, as in the fucking Fleetwood Mac song.”

Sam looks embarrassed for a moment. Then she gets distracted by another problem.

“Um, boss? There are only nine other Skype ids here. Aren’t there supposed to be twelve, with you included? Who are we missing?”

“Two of our souls are inside Robichaux’s witches, who are still at the school. I’m getting them after I kill the Supreme.”

The former cardinal scratches her head. She wants to object, but her boss is in a terrible mood that it's a dangerous proposition. The meeting hasn’t even started and already her nerves are frayed around the edges like one of Misty’s many embroidered scarves.

“What’s that look for, Sam? We can hide her body in the mud outside this hut while our Master does his unholy work. He’ll make sure she doesn’t resurrect before it’s time. He’s got big plans for that body.”

Fake Misty smirks at the thought. Their Father who art in Hell, unhallowed be thy name, selected twelve evil souls to possess the newly revived bodies of eleven witches and one warlock. Most of them were young so they would be easier to control. And they all performed Descensum at least once, which makes witches more vulnerable to possession.

Why Satan chose this particular strategy is anyone’s guess. Fake Misty certainly wasn’t told the reason. It’s safe to assume that he’ll command his agents to infiltrate power structures around the world and then await further instructions until such a time as those structures can be destroyed from within. Controlled chaos is practically the Dread Lord’s middle name. If the last several thousand years have taught him anything, it’s the virtue of infinite patience.

“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, boss. I’m not terribly knowledgeable about witches, but I do know one thing. When the Supreme dies, her power flows into a new Supreme.”

“Yes. And?”

“And if you kill Cordelia, where will her power go? Won’t the new Supreme stop you from leaving the school, if the other witches don’t do it first?”

“Yes, in theory, but we happen to know who the new Supreme is going to be, and that dumb bitch is nowhere near New Orleans. She’s in New York, playing house with our lost little Antichrist.”

The witches are having a really bad week, fake Misty knows. Their sneaky habit of snatching the devil’s due right from the jaws of death has resulted in the whole world discovering they can raise the dead. Mistrust of witches is at all all-time high, and as their first order of business, Satan’s agents intend to inflame that mistrust even more. They won’t stop until it’s a roaring fire of hatred, and the public is bent on the coven's total annihilation.

They’re building the perfect army already. When the late Fiona Goode teamed up with the late Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau to decimate the Delphi Trust and got the Axe Man to massacre its senior members, tanking their stock beyond recovery for good measure, they didn’t eliminate the threat to Cordelia’s coven. The lost souls have managed to convince the surviving hunters to resume murdering witches, even if they’ve got no clue who they really serve.

That’s just the problem with witch hunters. They’re like the Hydra: you cut off one head and two more spring up in its place, then ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. Before you know it, there’s a militia of radicalized losers ready to kill every Salem descendant on sight. Blessed bullets are a nice touch. Bare hands will do in a pinch.

“Hey, ‘Misty’? I have another question.”

The look in the other woman’s eyes is vaguely murderous, and to think: she never killed anyone in her lifetime. Well, that’s only technically true. She never killed anyone directly.

“Shoot.”

“I’m not asking you to tell me your real name, but I’m curious: what year did you die?”

“Me?” Fake Misty doesn’t particularly want to think about her death, undignified as it was (drugs were involved). “I died in the year the Berlin Wall fell.”

“So, that means you were in Hell for nearly three decades?”

Sam looks vaguely impressed.

“Yes, it’s been a wild ride, burning in the fourth circle. But can you stop asking questions now and get me a chilled La Croix? It’s not even spring in the bayou, yet here I am, sweating like Tammy Faye Bakker awaiting judgment at the pearly gates. Mascara running and all.”

The ex-cardinal purses her black lips and goes to look in the cooler they brought to the swamp, half-suspecting that Misty wouldn’t have a fridge.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re all out of both the La Croix and the Perrier. I can get you a drink from the cistern outside that collects rainwater—”

“What? That’s impossible. Go check the trunk, and hurry. Let’s get this shit-show on the road before Cordelia gets wise to our plan all the way in New Orleans.”

Sam heads out to the car to fetch the drinks and when she returns, she’s just in time to see her boss doubling over like someone punched her in the gut, retching like she’s about to spew the contents of her stomach onto the worm-eaten wood floor.

“Fuck… the stupid hippie cunt is fighting me for control…”

Fake Misty has never felt this nauseated. The real Misty feels the same way. Locked inside her own body, suppressed by a dark force strong enough to counteract her pure white light, she heard the name “Cordelia” and is now kicking out against her confinement like a wild horse.

Sam is at her boss’s side in an instant, holding up a bucket to catch the projectile vomit as the other soul convulses like a demon in the throes of an exorcism going right (or wrong, depending on your perspective). When she’s got nothing more to expel, the lost soul braces herself against the table and glares at the Skype app that’s open on the computer.

Fuck Misty Day and her Cajun _joie de vivre_!

She’s never hated anyone more, and yet there’s no time to seethe because the green phone icon flashes on the screen. Before pressing the button to start the call, fake Misty grits her teeth and issues a warning to her body’s real owner.

“If you continue to misbehave during our meeting, I’ll have no choice but to—” she looks ominously at the ancient boombox collecting dust and cobwebs in the corner, “—break Stevie.”

The kicking inside of her abruptly stops. Misty Day quiets down and agrees to lay low, for the time being.

Good. Now they can get started.

Nine girlish faces (and one boyish one) pop up one by one in the tiny windows on screen. Wiping her mouth one final time, their leader steps up to the table and introduces herself to the group as Misty Day.

“Praise Satan! Welcome to my little lair in the Louisiana swamp.”

A chorus of _Praise Satans_ answers back from all corners of the globe. In her hand is a notepad where’s jotted down their locations: Kyoto, Hyderabad, Sacramento, Singapore, Palermo. It’s a whole lot of time zones to coordinate, but that’s not even the tricky part. Getting Skype to work for everyone in the call is a miracle on par with the raising of Lazarus and the ascendance of Faust into paradise (Mephistopheles was robbed). Many of these souls died before computers were invented. Others died before typewriters, and a few in the era before print.

“Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, allow me to remind you that we refer to ourselves by our hosts’ names only. Don’t even _think_ your real names. Can anyone tell me why?”

It’s hard to see the tiny windows clearly, but no one raises their hand for the longest time. The silence in the hut is deafening as the lost souls shift in their seats. Only the amorous croak of some swampland Romeo resounds from deep in the bayou.

“Anybody? I’m disappointed in you already.”

A delicate hand shoots up on the screen. When the owner of said hand begins to speak, a raspy baritone issues from deep within the feminine vessel where a male soul now resides—and an ancient soul to boot, one who's mastered English grammar and syntax.

“It’s because true names are powerful. If our enemies were to learn them, they’d have a better chance of expelling us from these bodies and sending us back to Hell where we belong.”

“Excellent, Herr Doktor—I mean, Miss Celestine. I’m relieved to hear that someone understands our priorities. But let’s get one thing straight. We may be from Hell, but we belong right here on Earth, and soon there won’t be anyone left to oppose us.”

Another silence drops on the semi-derelict abode of a witch who used to be filled with nothing but love and light. A male voice speaks through the matching male body of the only warlock in their meeting.

“Define ‘soon.’”

“Nice to see that you could join us, Mr ‘Banks.’ I’d be happy to define ‘soon’ for you, and for anyone else who is doubting the logic of our Dark Lord and Savior.”

She goes to her bag and pulls out a document, then holds it up for everyone to see. 

“A few days ago, I emailed everyone ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy,’ a paper by Jem Bendell, a specialist on sustainable leadership. I expect you all to have read this paper for today’s meeting.”

_Even those of you who died illiterate_ , she wants to add.  _Even those of you who barely understand what a computer is._ Hell provided a few of these people centuries of idleness in which to contemplate their sins and learn a bunch of languages. There’s really no reason for anyone _not_ to have read the paper. The awkward quiet that ensues tells her otherwise.

Fuck this shit, honestly. Fake Misty is over it. The chicken-bone wind chimes hung on the porch sound like human skeletons twisting and rattling in the wind.

“What will happen to the world in about a decade from now?”

Once again, it’s the vivisectionist who raises the hand of his teenage host.

“Yes, Miss Celestine.”

“Total societal collapse.” Herr Doktor says it so cheerily, like it’s the best outcome he could have hoped for. He’s not wrong. “In the paper, Dr. Bendell states that, and I quote, ‘the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war—'”

“Yes, yes, all that good stuff. And how long does humanity have left before total societal collapse?”

“About a decade.”

“A decade. What’s that? Nothing. A drop of piss in the bucket where our Dread Lord is concerned.”

The implications are glorious. Fake Misty can see it now, the planet brought to heel, with nary a weapon of mass destruction launched by an orange-haired lunatic with nuclear codes. Who needs a plague of self-replicating nanobots to start the apocalypse, or whatever horror the military industrial complex comes up with next? In two decades, not even the wealthiest billionaire will be able to escape the ravages of global warming in his luxurious and well-stocked bunker or private compound.

The rich, being rich, will imagine they’re safe from the stinking hordes that roam the landscape in search of a hearty meal of human flesh. They’ll be wrong.

“You’re telling us that we should go into hiding, with nothing to do for the foreseeable future? Is this an order from Him? Or is it a plan that you, alone, have devised?”

The question comes from an Italian witch whom fake Misty knows to be harboring the soul of an assassinated dictator of a small Central American country. The dictator must be wondering why the Most Foul put her in charge, which is fine by her. Let him keep wondering.

The guessing game _did_ get tiresome, however, when she played it with Samantha, a devout woman desperate to know what fake Misty could have possibly done in her lifetime to deserve such a dishonor.

“You were a serial killer. No? Organized crime! Enron executive? Crusader. Umm… you shot Andy Warhol? Oh, I know, I know! Big pharma.”

Big pharma it was. Head swelling with self-love, fake Misty shoots the dictator a dirty look through the computer screen because She didn’t spend her final years raising prices on life-saving antivirals to be lectured by a man whose nickname was “Little Napoleon of the Tropics.”

“All you need to know is that I am His mouthpiece on Earth, at least where this mission is concerned.”

“What about the Antichrist? I’ve heard that he abandoned our cause, but that’s a little hard to believe.”

Michael, Michael, Michael. Why is it always about Michael?

“He’s been diverted from his path by forces that have worked against us for millennia. But with a little time and a little deception, his Father is confident that his son will quit solving crimes and rejoin us to start the apocalypse. It’s his birth right, after all.”

Looking at all the long faces on the screen as they anticipate a decade or more of sheer uselessness, their leader decides to give them a pep talk.

“Take heart, ye servants of the Beast! We’ll have plenty of work in the years ahead as we kill more witches and make more vessels for our brethren to join us. Using their powers, we’ll infiltrate every major government and business on Earth, weakening its foundation like termites in the woodwork, sowing discord and doubt until it implodes from within. Don’t feel bad if you don’t have a purpose yet. Every person gathered here today has a role to play in the grand design.”

She stops to assess the effect of her words, ignoring the subtle prod in the ribs from real Misty Day who’s still locked inside her own body. Is she going to hurl again? She must not. For the moment, at least, the “coven” is hanging on her every word, much like the boardrooms of yes men she once ruled with an iron fist in the Thatcherite eighties.

“Your skills and talents are manifold. Some of you have a gift for leadership and organization. Others are virtuosos of cruelty, born to be instruments of pain. Still others excel at following orders.”

She makes eye contact with a certain Prefect of Judea who is there among the faces on the screen, a man who once ordered a certain Nazarene carpenter to be nailed to the cross and has been embarrassed about it ever since, because it proved the maxim that no good deed goes unpunished—or, in his case, no foul deed goes unrewarded with eternal life. But no matter. The Prefect will redeem himself, yet. 

“If you are one of those who like to perpetuate injustice from the side lines, never think that our Dark Lord values you any less for your passivity. Take pride in the banality of your evil! To Him, your special kind of spiritual rot is the most beautiful of all.”

Everyone applauds.

 

*****

_Thirty seconds after Cordelia’s death_

Mallory gasps when it hits her, right in the solar plexus. It’s wrong, so wrong, to be the beneficiary of a gift born of another’s demise.

And yet.

It’s indescribable, the feeling of having all that power. Raw, untamed, impossible to contain. Limitless.

It surges and coils in her gut before flowing outwards into her veins, those tributaries that feed the plains of her body and nourish every cell. It feels like dying and being reborn in a newer, better, stronger form. It’s Mallory as she always was, only less filled with doubt, more like herself.

Michael is staring at her with quiet awe, and it’s too much all of a sudden. Being looked at like she hung the moon and the sun in the sky and all the planets and asteroids makes her deliriously happy, and yet it also scares her a little, like gasoline being poured on the fire of her awakening Supremacy.

She never imagined she could have him in the way she did today. That they would share such intimacy under the roof of their erstwhile mentor is the most shocking of all. But it happened, and it was glorious, magical, transformative, unbearable, soul-irradiating, and any other hyperbole she could rattle off in her daze.

And now—

—now it's like the universe telling her that it can’t last because the second that Mallory felt true and perfect happiness, the world began to fall apart at the seams, and all the weight of it fell on her shoulders.

She _may_ want the Supremacy, one day. Today is not that day, however.

She’d rather have the happiness.

“Cordelia’s dead,” she finally says.

“I can see that.”

They’re standing a few feet apart in the locked guest bedroom as the rest of the house erupts in hysterics. There’s screeching in the hallway and the sound of frantic feet hammering the floor and the unmistakable wail of _Cordeliaaaaa_ issuing from Myrtle as she collapses on the stairs.

“What the fuck is happening? Are we under attack? Let’s go help them—”

“No. Stay where you are. The danger has passed.”

Mallory makes a move for the door, but Michael is quicker as he grabs her by the arm, then withdraws it quickly, as if burned by hot coals. She’s too luminous now to be touched by a creature of darkness like him, and if he had any sense at all, he’d slink away into the shadows and leave the witches to fix their own problems. Instead, he won’t leave her side, which is foolish. He's a moth flying into an open flame in the full knowledge that it will render him flightless.

“Don’t go down there, not yet.”

“What is it? Do you know who killed Cordelia? If they were still in the house, I would feel them.”

She’d also feel Cordelia’s body, the remnant of the dead woman’s aura, but there’s nothing left, not even a trace. In a moment of terror, she wonders if the killer destroyed her body in such a way that she can never be revived.

“Think, Mallory. Deduce. _Divine_.”

She’s never been good a divination. Now, as Supreme, she’s brilliant. An image comes into her mind without any effort when she seeks understanding of recent events. She sees… but it can’t be.

“Misty did this?”

“No. Someone wearing her skin. There’s no time to explain it in detail. Cordelia may be dead, but we can bring her back,” Michael reassures her, frantic to get it all out someone interrupts. “We’ll go down in a minute to join the others, but promise me one thing, first. Whatever happens in the next few hours, you must trust me implicitly. If the situation seems hopeless at any point, please remember that I solved this case long before we stepped foot in New Orleans. And whatever happens, you must know that I, that I—”

A loud banging on the door cuts off his words. It’s Madison, no longer frisky and ready to play.

“I know that whatever you two are doing in there has made you oblivious to the rest of the world, but get your tongues out of each others' asses and listen: our Supreme is fucking dead! Myrtle is requesting the presence of her Royal Highness in the dining room. Oh, and bring your pet Antichrist.” 

“We’re coming down, just give us a second.”

The witch traipses away in her platforms as Michael turns to Mallory one final time. He tries to take his eyes off her, but finds that he can’t. He wants to finish declaring what he started to, but he can’t do that either.

“Listen carefully. My Father’s legions on Earth are growing stronger every day. They’ve claimed the bodies of twelve magic users already, and they plan to claim more. They’ve enlisted what’s left of the Delphi Trust to pick you off one by one and send you to my Father before another witch brings you back. If you’ve performed Descensum, my Father has seen you, heard you, held you, probed your immortal soul for a weakness, a way in. Hell is not what you think.”

Just as she’s grappling with the meaning of these enigmatic words, Mallory’s phone starts to ring in her jacket pocket. It’s Queenie. Time to go downstairs.  

“One final thing. Now that the souls have powers, they’ll create a diversion that’s designed to draw you out of the school and then to separate you from each other. Don’t go. The real battle will take place elsewhere. I’ll fight it alone.”

“What are you talking about?”

Outside in the hallway, girls are running and there’s crying on the stairs. Downstairs, the senior witches are assembled in the dining room-turned-war room and in varying states of distress.

Zoe is sobbing into her hands as Queenie rubs circles into her back.

“That _thing_ wasn’t Misty Day,” she whispers at her crying friend, who won’t be consoled.

“I know, but what if Misty was in there, watching herself hold the knife? It’s so awful.”

Myrtle is on the verge of hyperventilating as her mind runs through all the possible scenarios of how to get Delia back. Beside her is Irene Adler, who's cool as a cucumber and scrolling through Twitter.

“Congrats, bitch. You’re the new Supreme. Bet it’s what you’ve always wanted.”

Madison is chain-smoking to soothe herself and flicking the spent butts into a crystal candy bowl as she glowers at the last two people to arrive. 

“Actually, no.” Mallory drops into the empty chair beside her and waves away the coils of smoke that her frenemy blows in her direction on purpose. Now that all eyes are on her, she’s more than a little self-conscious. “I never wanted this. Maybe one day I will, but it’s too early. We’ll bring Cordelia back. Where is she?”

“If we only knew that, my child…”

Myrtle’s voice is weaker than anyone’s ever heard it. Not a good sign.

“In the swamp,” Michael replies. He sounds so sure of himself that no one thinks to question him.

“Then what are we waiting for?” Queenie is ready to spring into action. “Let’s go to the swamp right away. Mallory can take us directly, now that she’s got the power to transmute over great distances.”

“Woah, hold on a minute there. I don’t know how to do that.”

“What do you mean you don’t know how? Whoever is piloting Misty’s body could do it, and do you think they had time to practice?”

“Queenie, darling, Mallory’s never been to the swamp and Misty’s killer has. Even if she practiced her new powers, she’d need a clear mental picture of the place to get us there safely. Unless you want to get dropped under ten feet of slime with alligators snapping at your heels all the way on the other end of the bayou.”

“I’m with Myrtle,” says Irene. “We should stay where we are, safe within the wards of the house.”

“Some wards,” scoffs Madison. “If this one was able to waltz in through the bushes in the garden, like the creeper he is. At least ‘Misty’ was invited in.”

The “creeper” is Michael, who takes no offence. He’s too busy contemplating his next move in between wondering why the coven doesn’t show a little more respect for Mallory. She _is_ their leader now, for better or worse.

“Girls? There’s something you should see.” Irene’s eyes are glued to the phone in her hand. “Can someone turn on the news? I know there’s an invisible TV in here.” 

There most certainly is an invisible television in the room, enchanted by Myrtle to resemble an oil painting of the English countryside so it doesn’t clash with the tasteful décor. Shaky footage of a disturbance in downtown NOLA plays on the screen. The souls are wasting no time in trying to lure the witches out into open battle.  

Madison, Queenie, and Zoe can hardly believe what they’re seeing.

“What the fuck? How did they get down there so fast?”

“And where did they get horses?”

The stars of the diversion are Gabrielle and Katalin, or, rather, Elizabeth Bathory and Gilles de Rais.

The possessed girls vanished from their room upstairs in the same instant that fake Misty absconded with Cordelia’s body, in a complex feat of transubstantiation that no one in the coven believed the swamp witch was capable of. Now, the medieval serial killers controlling their bodies are parading on horseback through the French Quarter, as horrified onlookers flee the sidewalk and police try to break through the barricade of cars at each end of the street. They’re going from storefront to storefront, using telekinesis to shatter the glass and scatter its contents into the street. While the footage is shaky, there don’t appear to be any casualties.

“We need to get down there before someone gets hurt. What’s the plan?”

Myrtle opens her mouth to answer Queenie, only to realize that the girl wasn’t addressing her. Everyone’s looking at Mallory.

“I don’t have a plan. But…uh… I agree that we need to go down there.”

"Go where? To the swamp? Or to the French Quarter?"

A tug on her sleeve jolts her out of her confusion.

Michael shoots her a meaningful look. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Mal, going to either location.”

It must have something to do with what he told her earlier, about thinking before she strides into open battle with Satanists and quite possibly the witch hunters they are allied with—but what else can they do?

By putting on such a public spectacle of mischief and witchcraft, the souls clearly mean to destroy the coven’s good name (though how “good” the name is after the Vitalum scandal, that's debatable).

Mallory needs to stop them. She needs to act now. Any further delay could cost someone their life. 

Before he can say anything more, Michael’s phone lights up with an unknown caller. Much to everyone’s dismay, he apologizes for having to take the call outside.

Myrtle is aghast. “Right now? In the middle of an emergency?”

Even Mallory finds this behavior a little odd, but nods in understanding when he mouths the name “Marie Laveau.” She’s the only woman alive who could be called an expert on hunting the witch hunters, so it makes sense to get her involved. 

In truth, Michael hangs up on Marie the second he leaves the dining room and goes back upstairs. Where he plans to go, no one can follow. At least, no one alive.

He locks the door of his guestroom and takes a little vial of black powder out of his bag. Then he kicks away the rug and sprinkles it on the bare hardwood floor. Fine grains slide around until they reform into a ring about two meters in diameter.

The moment that Michael steps inside the ring, two things happen. First, the power ignites into blue flames that burn so hot they could incinerate a soul, and second, Mallory bursts into the room after blowing the door off its hinges.

Her screaming face is the last thing he sees before descending into Hell.

 

*****

_Ten minutes after Cordelia’s death_

Michael is alone in a dark, floating, weightless. Nothing is holding him up. Nothing is pressing him down. It’s just him and a whole lot of cosmic void for company.

When you astral-project in the Descensum ritual, your body remains on the surface to await your soul’s return, but only if you’re strong enough to break the spell of your own suffering. Michael has done something different in travelling to Hell in his actual body, a feat never attempted by a witch. One false step from the witch, and the whole of her would be incinerated. Not even her soul would remain for God to judge.

After a while, Michael feels solid ground beneath his feet as something resembling gravity forces him to stand. The cool air starts to warm up from an invisible heat source until it’s an inferno, appropriately enough. The darkness is so total that the very concept of light makes no sense. Try explaining the concept to a subterranean creature with no use of eyes.

Michael blinks. There is a light in the void now, beckoning him to follow it across a vast distance.

He walks.

Then he walks some more.

After some time—whether hours of minutes, it’s hard to tell—the pinprick of light starts to grow larger and larger until it’s the size and shape of a house, totally alone in the black expanse.

Michael knows this house. The red brickwork turret. The stained glass glowing all colors, lit from within. The sense of creeping dread and inarticulate despair that emanates from every door and every window.

“Father? Are you there? I need to speak with you, in person.”

As he strolls through the gate and walks through the unlocked front door, he can feel the futility of those last words: _in person_.

When has his Father ever appeared to him in person? Is there even a “person” there?

For as long as he’s known his true identity, Michael has felt Satan to be a boundless, shapeless, infinitely malevolent entity that only takes sensory form when absolutely necessary, and sometimes not even then. His Father has never spoken to him in anything like human language, nor has he ever touched him with anything like human hands (in fact, he’s never touched him at all). If Satan decides to “speak” to Michael, it won’t be directly, and it won’t be pretty.

The truth of Hell is that Satan is everywhere.

When Michael told Mallory that his Father sits motionless like a spider in the center of its web, and that this web has a thousand radiations whose every quiver he knows like the back of his hand, he left out one detail. The spider _is_ the web, and every sinner who’s ever lived and died without repenting is caught in it, quivering for eternity to the beat of their worst nightmare. 

Everything that passes for matter down here is an emanation of the Most Foul himself, a projection of the evil consciousness that manufactures prison cells by the billions for souls that are denied entry to Heaven.

Each cell is personalized for its intended occupant. No two cells are alike. Each sufferer’s loop plays and replays for eternity, and there’s no given duration.

Most loops last no more than a few minutes. Some last for hours, wearing down the sinner through repetition of minor pains before the sequence resets. A rare few last for days, or weeks, even months.

The reason that Michael thinks of them now, all those personal hells on a loop, is because Mallory’s personal hell has one of the longer ones he knows about.

_This_ is why the future Supreme ran away from the coven. For a witch to break the spell of Descensum and return to her body, thus proving herself worthy of leading the coven, the loop must run through at least once in its entirety. Only when it restarts does the witch became aware of where she is and can begin plotting her escape.

To the rest of the coven, Mallory was in Hell for about two minutes. In her own mind, however, she was trapped there for two weeks, the amount of time it took her grandmother to die after being hit by a drunk driver and left for dead at a crossing in her small town.

It’s no use thinking about that now. Mallory isn’t here and won’t return in the future, Michael is sure of it.

His own trial begins in the dining room of the Murder House, which served as the office of Ben Harmon in his therapy practice. In fact, it probably still does, only Ben has a single patient now in Tate Langdon, otherwise known as his biological father.

A psychiatric session is in progress. The patient? Michael himself.

Ben is seated in his usual chair, notepad in hand. He motions for Michael to sit on the black leather couch opposite.

Michael can’t say that he blames this man for abandoning him. What else could he do when his younger self destroyed the souls of that newlywed couple? It’s the most disgusting thing he’s ever done, and he’s eaten his fair share of human hearts. The Almighty is a jealous God. There’s no atoning for the theft of a soul marked for paradise.

“Are you my Father?”

It’s a silly question, and so Ben laughs.

“I am not your father. Why would you ask me that?”

“No reason.”

He lays on the couch a while longer without saying a word.

“Are you Ben Harmon?”

His second question isn’t met with laughter.

“Do I look like Dr. Harmon to you?”

“No.”

Michael obviously knows that the real Dr. Harmon is stuck in the Murder House, a liminal stopover between Hell and Earth. For some reason, he really wants the simulacrum to admit that he’s a simulacrum.

“Tell my Father that I wish to make a trade.”

Ben looks intrigued.

“What kind of trade?”

Michael raises himself on his elbows to explain the terms of the trade, watching the man’s face the whole time to see what he knows. His Father could easily pluck the whole plan from his mind without breaking a sweat, despite their tacit agreement that he won’t read his mind. That’s the one dignity that Satan has ever afforded his son. Maybe he feels that he doesn’t need to look inside his thoughts. After all, Michael’s myriad agonies are an open, well-thumbed book to him already.

“I’m willing to trade my _eventual_ cooperation in His apocalypse for an immediate cessation of all hostilities on Earth.”

The simulacrum of Ben nods in understanding. The Dread Lord may be willing to listen, _may_ being the key word. This is already more cooperation than he’s seen since from the boy since his first Black Mass.

“For how long?”

“A decade of peace.” 

The house begins to rumble and shake at once, as if the very ground it stands on is breaking apart. The shadows lengthen and the floor liquifies, as does the furniture, and the walls; everything around Michael turns pitch black and slowly reconstitutes into another mirage.

He’s standing outdoors in a concrete landscape now, with the sunlight burning in his eyes. It takes a moment to remember why this place makes him feel so sick: it’s the reservoir where the coven like to burn their enemies at the stake. This is where his Ms. Mead died on Cordelia’s pyre.

He cries.

The woman was evil to the bone, exploiting his childish need for love and affection. She never saw Michael as Michael, only as the prophesized destroyer that would bring about Hell on Earth, and yet for her many faults, Ms. Mead was the closest thing he’s ever had to a mother. He can’t hate her entirely.

Three stakes with three bodies tied to them grow out of the ground while he’s wiping his tears away. The body in the center belongs to Ms. Mead, alive and unburnt for the time being. A lit torch materializes in Michael’s hand, pulling him towards the stake, as if daring him to set her ablaze.

“Michael, my boy,” speaks the bound woman, her voice vibrating with emotion. “It’s so good to see you.”

He’s not foolish enough to believe that it’s her, the real her, released from the inaccessible place where Cordelia banished her soul for safekeeping.

_The road to perdition is paved in warm smiles_.

“You’re all skin and bones,” she tuts as he comes closer, lit torch shaking in his hand. “Don’t they feed you anything up in that world of yours?”

His voice cracks like a boy’s when he repeats the terms of his trade. He vows to return to the path of destruction, whose siren song he’s been fighting by lashing himself to the mast, and complete his mission on Earth. Why? Because prophecy is inevitable. However, he’ll only do it in exchange for a decade of peace, a measly ten years, practically nothing for an entity staring down the barrel of a loaded eternity.

What he doesn’t mention—what he barely admits to himself, burying it under the conviction that he’ll outsmart the devil before he claims his rightful due—is that Mallory is the driving force behind this whole plan.

If Michael had to choose between her safety and that of the world, there’s no doubt in his mind that he’d choose the former and damn the latter. It’s not even a question.

The world doesn’t need to survive as much as Mallory needs to survive. Her happiness is the sole matter of concern now, the reason for the seasons changing and the sun rising and setting each day.

Ms. Mead smiles when she hears his vow, which she promises to pass on to his Father under one condition: he must light her on fire.

“Excuse me?”

“Go on, boy. Light me up. What are you waiting for?”

Michael recoils from this invitation to violence. The memory of her charred remains is bad enough.

“You must, to get the message through.”

Anyone who drives a bargain with the devil ends up getting the raw end of the deal. Michael is betting on being the sole exception that proves the rule. Foolish, so foolish. But what’s a solemn vow sealed in fire and blood with a decade to think up a way to get out of it?

_It’s not real._

The scene changes a third time when Ms. Mead’s robe catches on fire and the flames blaze a trail up her torso to engulf her cackling face. 

Michael is back to the start of his journey, as if he never left Robichaux’s at all.

“Hello?”

The entrance hall is deserted, not a witch to be heard or seen anywhere, nor a magical presence to be felt. Where did they all go?

Michael opens the door of the dining room and peeks inside. What he sees nearly makes him hurl.

The corpses of witches, young and old, are strewn about the floor, their skin punctured by nails in countless places. Queenie, Zoe, and several others he knew from his brief time at Robichaux’s—they’re all here, all dead. Whoever massacred them is gone from the house.

He races upstairs, a single word on his lips, a name.

_Mallory_.

Cordelia’s study is empty.

He exhales. She’s not here. Considering the state of her sisters, that’s probably for the best.

_Where are you?_

All he cares about is her safety, even in this hellish simulacrum.

A light tap on his right shoulder rouses him. When he turns around, his heart stops beating a beat and leaps into his throat like it’s trying to make a bloody run for the door.

Mallory stands before him, a vision straight from his worst nightmares. Her skin is ashen. A large bloodstain mars the front of her dress. Blue lips match the rings around her eyes, which are bottomless and empty. She’s witnessed untold horrors yet doesn’t speak, not even when Michael falls to his knees.

“What happened to you?” His voice barely rises above a whisper. “Are you dead?”

_Did I do this to you?_

The specter of the girl he loves remains silent as he crawls forward and wraps his arms around her legs, not caring that his Father is seeing it all, orchestrating it all, because who’s more familiar with the depths of Michael’s depravity than he?

The vision threads her soft, oddly lifelike fingers through his hair as he buries his face into the bloodied cloth and starts to sob uncontrollably.

“Ten years of peace,” says the simulacrum. “Use them wisely. After that, you return to us, body and soul.”

_And the world will suffer._

 

*****

_Two hours after Cordelia’s death (and one hour after her resurrection)_

Mallory hasn’t had such a confusing day in her whole life. Losing control with Michael was blissful beyond words, but she never got to enjoy it before the Supremacy was thrust on her unwilling shoulders and changed her mind about everything.

And then it was taken away.

The power she possessed so briefly never changed her mind about Michael. Him she understands even better now for having tasted that intoxicating yet dangerous cordial.

There’s only one problem. They’ve arrived back at Robichaux’s and there’s still no sign of the mysterious man.

It’s not the first time that he’s descended to Hell without telling her. Last time it happened, he returned after a few days, broken in body and spirit, covered in wounds and half-dead from the spiritual exertion. This time around, he may not even return.

It pains her to imagine him alone and undefended in that horrible place. Mallory plans to go down there herself if he doesn’t return soon. Too bad she’s no longer the strongest magic user on Earth.

By some miracle, the witches managed to contain the disturbance in the French Quarter without being ambushed by more Satanists or getting shot at by witch hunters. The whole incident with Bathory and de Rais parading on horseback and causing property damage for the sheer entertainment value of it was exactly what Michael said it would be: a spectacle to get the public hating the witches even more than on the day the Vitalum scandal broke.

And it worked. The coven was all the talking heads could talk about. Professional historians went on the news to dissect the sordid history of Miss Robichaux’s. Anxious mothers clutched their children with one hand and dialed their nearest police station with the other. Concerned citizens were proposing anti-witch legislation and getting support from any local representatives that were up for re-election. The scandal would never end, even with Irene working overtime to put out multiple fires.

The real reason why the violence stopped in its tracks was the Thing Michael did in Hell. Whatever is was, that Thing, it released the bodies of the witches from possession. Mallory remembers the exact moment it happened. Gabrielle and Katalin slumped to the ground and blacked out. When they came to, they blinked in disbelief at the chaos unfolding all around them. Bathory and de Rais were suddenly gone, sucked back into Hell the same infernal way they came. Gone too was the evil possessing Misty.

It happened about halfway between her swamp hut and the interstate, as fake Misty drove along a dirt road with Samantha Crowe in the passenger seat and Cordelia’s mud-wrapped body in the trunk.

The car jolted to a complete stop in the middle of the cypress grove. Sam’s head jerked forward while Misty’s hit the steering wheel.

“Ow.”

“What is it? Why did we stop?”

It took Misty a moment to figure out where she was. When she did, her only thought was of Delia.

“If we don’t he witches will come here looking for—”

Struck dumb all of a sudden, Sam gasped as an unseen force blew her out of her seat and all the way to the edge of the slimy pond on the side of the road. Without so much as a push from the awakening witch, the former cardinal lost her balance and fell into the water.

Misty got out of the car slowly, watching Sam as she flailed around.

“I wouldn’t splash if I were you,” she advised before turning her back and walking to the trunk. “The gators are real hungry this time of year.”

“Boss! I mean, Miss Day! You wouldn’t abandon me to die here, not a pure, unblemished soul such as yourself…”

Misty couldn’t hear Samantha’s cries anymore, so intent was she on getting her beloved Cordelia out of the trunk and unwrapping her from the caked Louisiana mud keeping her fresh until such a time as the intruder decided to house another lost soul in the most powerful witch body on Earth. Tears streaming down her cheeks, Misty crouched down to blow the breath of life back into the dead woman, and she didn’t stop crying until she felt her dear friend stir and start coughing up blood and mud. 

“Thank the goddess you’re back. I’m so sorry, Delia. That woman, she wasn’t me.”

“I know,” replied Cordelia, hugging her back weakly.

Back inside the hallowed white walls of Miss Robichaux’s, Mallory felt it all leach away—the power, the possibility, the responsibility.

Just as she’s contemplating a journey to Hell, the front door opens a crack. Michael practically stumbles through it, looking more than a little worse for wear—though nothing compared to the first time he returned form the accursed place with a Stradivarius in tow, a romantic gesture if there ever was one.

“Michael!”

She throws herself around his neck a little violently. He stumbles, then laughs, watching her try and fail to wipe the delirious, half-crazed smile off her face.

“Where have you been?”

“You don’t want to know.”

It’s true. She doesn’t want to know. She really, really doesn’t.

Heart still racing, Mallory takes one final look around the house before proposing an idea that is the height of rudeness.

“They’re busy celebrating Cordelia’s return. Do you think they’ll care if we don’t say goodbye?”

“Let’s find out.”

 

*****

Michael is oddly calm on the flight back to New York, too spent to complain about the altitude or the rude cabin crew or the cramped leg space. Mallory is napping on his shoulder, oblivious to the annoyances around her.

Right before she fell asleep, she asked about what had transpired in Hell.

He lied. What else could he do?

“I told him that his plan would never work because I would slaughter every last witch on Earth if he didn’t pull his agents out.”

“And he believed you? He’s not stupid! You’re always saying that he’s an abstract thinker, and he must have read your mind.”

“I meant what I said. At least, in that moment.”

She didn’t believe him. Who could blame her? The lie was pretty transparent.

“There’s something you’re not telling me. You made some kind of deal with him.”

“There was no deal.”

“Michael…”

“Okay, okay. There may have been a kind of deal.”

“Not your soul, I hope?”

Her voice was reed-thin, straining for bravery, failing.

“No, nothing like that.”

Truth be told, Michael doesn’t have anything resembling a strategy for how to get out of the deal he made with the devil. Satan clearly won’t honor the covenant. He loves interfering in the doings of mortals too much, and once he turns his attention to those who have the misfortune of being close to Michael…

His son looks down at Mallory’s sleeping face, admiring the long shadow cast by her eyelashes and the sweet downward curve of her small mouth. He’s been holding her left hand for the whole duration of the flight—or, to be more exact, clinging to her hand for dear life, caressing it like it’s the most delicate thing in all creation. Exhausted, she doesn’t even stir when he traces the ghostly outline of her fingers one by one, drawing long slow lines from the grooves between her knuckles to the tops of her nails, before moving to rub soothing circles into her palm with the roughened pad of his thumb. It becomes a pattern, more for his comfort than hers, that he maintains through the anxiety of the landing and the disorienting walk through the airport and the sleepy cab ride home.

When they finally arrive at the brownstone, Mallory is first through the door. Home is just how they left it, yet it feels different somehow—airier, lighter, less expectant of catastrophe.

She’s not stupid, Mallory. Michael definitely reached some kind of agreement with his Father that he won’t tell her about, and yet it still feels like a huge weight has been lifted off her shoulders, and not just the weight of her fleeting Supremacy.

Out of that experience she emerged feeling reborn or renewed somehow, like she’s been re-forged in steel or, better yet, titanium.

Her midterm exam in Social Psychology on Monday? Piece of cake.

Demons running amok in one of New York’s toniest Catholic schools? She can deal with that, too.

A nest of vampires in Hoboken? All she needs to know is where they are.

And if there’s a coven to lead into a very uncertain future when Cordelia begins to decline in a few decades? If that’s her destiny, Mallory will be ready for it. She’ll put aside all complaints about witch culture, from its love of capital punishment to its needlessly perilous Seven Wonders test.

As for Michael, he’ll have no choice but to move down to New Orleans when the time comes. They can reform the coven together, sweep away all its medievalizing mores and remake it along more democratic lines, because who says that witches have to be unified under a single authority in order to survive? Mallory intends to test that rule, with the help of one former Antichrist.

Unless—

No, she won’t think about it, can’t bear to.

Michael watches her drop her bag in the hallway and race to the shower, discarding her clothes along the way. He’s half-expecting to see the cat slink out of the shadows, when he remembers that poor Circe is still with the landlady. They’ll have to pick her up tomorrow.

So tired that he can barely stand, he follows the dropped clothes like a trail of bread crumbs, picking them up one by one: jacket, shirt, jeans, belt, socks, bra, panties… panties that are gossamer-thin and pale-pink and decorated with a tiny purple bow…

The door to the larger bathroom is ajar. The color in his cheeks turns into a full-blown flush when he spots her outline through the screen. She’s under the stream of water, which is running very hot and filling the small room with steam. He wastes no time before undressing, though he lingers outside the fogged glass so as not to startle her.

He needn’t have worried. Moving the screen aside so he can enter, she’s working the shampoo into her hair and looking at him expectantly like he’s supposed to take over now. The way her dark eyes sweep over his body from head to toe makes him painfully hard, and he’s not even in the shower yet. 

Seeing him for the first time, she can’t hide her amazement. His cock hangs heavy between his legs like predator in repose, thick and long and beautifully formed. Brushing against it reveals that it’s softer than silk yet harder than steel, a beautiful contradiction.

Is a cock able to blush, anatomically speaking? In the fever grip of her desire, she could swear that his just turned a rosier hue.   

Bubbles form under his fingers as they work their menial magic all over her scalp, and she leans back into his chest to enjoy the massage without falling when her knees buckle. Supporting her in his arms, Michael positions her under the shower head and tips her head backwards so the suds wash away. He takes the opportunity to plant a line of kisses down the side of her throat, which earns him a few whimpers until she’s practically putty in his hands.

Strong arms encircle her waist. Cunning fingers creep upward, grazing the edge of her breasts before grabbing two handfuls and pinning her against him so she can feel his hardness. All thoughts of getting clean are gone, even as water blasts them from above. Mallory tries to wiggle out his grasp and turn around so she’s facing him, but he won’t give her that kind of control, and neither will he let her grind against him with impunity. There’s a growl in her ear and a hand around her neck, tapping the most sensuous of warnings against her jugular. 

“Be a good girl now and hold still.”

She _is_ being good, though. What more does he want? The answer appears to be “total stillness” because he rewards her the moment she quiets down and stops moving.

The hand on her hip travels down the curve of her ass until it comes upon that miracle of miracles: soft, pliant folds that part around a single finger inserted shallowly, teasingly, careful not to give too much, too quickly.

“How are you this wet already?”

It’s a wonder of nature. He marvels. Hot water runs in rivulets between her breasts and drips off her stiff nipples as he pins her beneath the stream, and yet she’s wetter than all of it. The wettest place in the room is between her legs—a beautiful waterfall, private and secluded, waiting just for him.

“Slow down… unless you want me to embarrass myself by c—ah, _fuck_.”

She’s overly sensitive where he’s touching her, burning in her cunt with her clit virtually untouched. That’s not how her anatomy normally works. There’s no real explanation for it.

His hand is still clamped on her throat, ready for the moment that she moves out of position, whines for more contact, or tries to grind on his finger without his permission. Knowing that he could choke the life out of her so easily only drives her to new heights of arousal.

It’s hardly fair. Michael is all eyes as he shifts her forward to better see the way her greedy little cunt swallows one digit, then two, whatever it takes to stretch her out. But she’s grateful that the running water disguises whatever desperate sounds her poor cunt is making as it sucks in his talented fingers again and again.

“So eager to play, when you could barely keep your eyes open in the cab.”

Well, Mallory is wide awake now, as a single finger curves towards her G-spot with such precision that she wonders if he’s got a detailed blueprint of the inside of her cunt committed to memory. He must have.

Focused on the rhythmical in-and-out of his hand, Mallory doesn’t notice when the shower head detaches from its high perch and floats down on what little scrap of telekinetic power Michael is able to muster in his exhausted yet still deliriously aroused state. The two of them should be passed out in their separate beds now and catching up on sleep, yet here they are, keeping each other awake in the sweetest ways imaginable.

When the nozzle finds her clit and the flow of water is cranked up to its highest setting, Mallory screams, literally screams like he’s killing her.

As a strong hand covers her mouth, she doesn’t know what to do. Does she grind backwards and impale herself on his pumping fingers or lean forward into the spray? The combined force of the two assaults leaves her little choice. Before she’s ready to surrender to a self-satisfied Michael who keeps his own arousal at a safe distance from her needy cunt, her orgasm arrives with all the finesse of an atomic bomb flattening the landscape in a burst of white light.

A second orgasm is already on the horizon even as she reels from the aftershock of the first, but he won’t allow it to come, not like this. Instead of letting her stay in the same position, Michael flips her around so she’s facing his chest, then tilts up her chin. What she sees robs her of the last bit of breath in her lungs and turns her limbs invertebrate.

Darkened blue eyes, their pupils blown wide, stare through a wet curtain of blonde curls that cling to his face and neck. He never breaks eye contact as he gets on his knees and nudges her legs apart. She can’t bear to look anymore when he takes his battle station and starts to lap at her folds with all the self-restraint of a man transported to paradise. He buries his nose in her cunt as if breathing were optional.

Mallory really wishes she had more control over her bodily responses. It’s a tragedy that she can’t hold off her second orgasm too much longer, not when her clit is so painfully engorged and her nerve endings are on fire. First, he teased the aching nub with the shower head while pumping her full of his fingers. Now, his hand returns to her cunt as he lathes her clit with a frantic tongue, then begins to suck it so relentlessly that she cums again before she’s ready to and nearly blacks out.  

Something has definitely altered in Michael. There’s no hesitation in his movements anymore, no bearing witness to her every micro-expression in response to his touches, no withholding of pleasure for the promise of a more intense one to come.

No. He must have her. Now.

If he doesn’t, there’s no telling what might happen, to himself, to the world.

Shutting off the water with his mind, he picks up a now-boneless Mallory like she weighs less than a feather and dries her off with large fluffy towel, then carries her, bridal-style, into his bedroom, whose door he kicks open with such careless force that it nearly breaks off the hinges.

Mallory is in for it, now. If she asked him to stop, would he? Possibly. But why would she ask him to stop? She loves the savage look on his face as he surveys the spoils of their little love-war arrayed so prettily on his black satin sheets. From her perspective, nothing compares to this, not even the sensation of becoming Supreme.

Michael descends on her cunt again, as if to imprint her most intimate taste on his tongue before pulling away and taking his hardness in hand, giving his cock a few quick pumps in preparation.

A glistening drop of pre-cum catches the candlelight before he swipes it away, and she moans at the calloused feel of his thumb as it smears that drop over her clit. Grabbing her breasts in both hands, he kneads them together a few times before bringing his mouth down on one nipple and then on the other. He swirls his tongue around the sensitive areolas, leaving a trail of saliva mixed with her own juices. He aligns himself with her opening and begins to push in, slowly, deliberately, while his mouth remains latched to her reddening nipples, treating them roughly like her comfort is the last thing on his mind.

But she can tell that her pleasure is his top priority when he raises his head and, before he ploughs any deeper, checks her face for any sign of pain or distress.

All he finds there is pleasure and bliss.

Without any further ado, he thrusts the rest of way in as she wraps her legs around his hips and her mind dissolves into pure sensation.

“How are you this tight? I don’t understand…”

The way he asks the question, it’s not even rhetorical. He genuinely can’t believe how tight her velvety walls grip his cock, holding on for dear life lest he withdraw and leave her tragically bereft.

“Fuck me… don’t hold back, like I’m some fragile thing… I won’t break,” she reminds him in fitful whispers, in between moans both loud and long and certain to wake every unfortunate soul on the street. He hears, and feels, the soft rumbling of a minor earthquake, the ground shifting under their bodies as if their coupling is being felt in multiple realms, not just the terrestrial one. 

The sweet way he buries his face in the crook of her neck is completely at odds with how he penetrates her with a hellish fury. Going full demon now, he’s driving deeper than she ever thought possible, rocking the walls of her self-composure until they crumble into dust.

Nothing is real in that moment except the perfect marriage of corporeal and spiritual extasy, the kind described by medieval saints who call themselves the brides of Christ.

St. Teresa of Avila being gutted by a golden arrow shot by an angel has nothing on Mallory. The only difference is that Christ is very far from her mind as she’s getting fucked by the literal son of the devil.

Mallory is the first to orgasm, and when she hurtles over the edge a third time, it’s no two-second affair. Somehow, her cunt spasms around his cock for a good half-minute, like she’s riding out multiple orgasms in quick succession. He spends himself inside her with low groan, painting the tender walls of her much-abused pussy.

Sleep claims her quickly after that, the deep, dreamless sleep of a final death. Yet she awakens sometime in the night, sticky between the legs and held tightly by a very awake Michael. He’s peering at her from across the pillow with soft, loving eyes that have a little bit of fear in them—fear that reminds her of his journey to Hell.

Burrowing into the warmth of his chest, she wants to ask more questions, even as she feels herself being pulled back into dreamland where such questions take another, more vivid form.

In the end, she decides against it. What would be the point? He’ll only lie to her.

Michael is vulnerable. He’s still processing those events. He’ll tell her when he’s good and ready. Well maybe just ready.

On the verge of falling asleep for the second and final time that night, Mallory gets a diabolical idea.

Truly diabolical. 

“Michael?”

“Yes, dearest?”

He lifts her chin from his chest to look in her eyes, whose expression is mostly concealed by the candle-less dark.

“Let’s have a party.”

This takes him aback. He really wasn’t expecting it.

“A what?”

“A party, Michael. As in, people coming over to a home-cooked meal and wine, and—”

“I’m familiar with the concept. Why in the name of Judas do you want to have a party? It’s annoying enough when clients come over.”

He thinks it would be a major inconvenience, all those people traipsing through the brownstone and pawing his magical artifacts, most of which are so cursed they shouldn’t even be looked at, let alone touched. An atmosphere of forced conviviality is just about the worst thing he can imagine. It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of.

“Just a small gathering. You can invite your favorite clients, or the ones you can stand. I’ll invite Coco and a few girls from school, and you can call Marie when she’s done hunting the witch hunter. Maybe Andre Stevens will want to come, too. I hear he’s doing better and has a new boyfriend.”

He enfolds her tighter in his arms. They’ve only just begun discovering each other’s bodies. He wants to stay like this forever, inside their own little world. The “real” world outside may well be a nasty figment of his imagination.

“A party, with other people? Bold of you to assume that I’ll let you leave this bed any time soon. Now that you belong to me, I won’t let anyone else have you, not even for a few measly minutes.”

It warms her heart (and cunt) to hear him say these things, but it’s too late. The idea is already germinating in her mind.

“We can have it in a month or two, if you prefer. I know! We’ll create a new holiday, say, three days before Easter. On the night that Christ was arrested. We can call it… Judas Kiss.”

He groans. It’s the most ridiculous idea that he’s ever heard. And yet.

“Really, Mallory, what will you think of next? That we’ll decorate the doorway with olive branches so it looks like the garden of Gethsemane?"

“Perfect! We’ll have people kiss under it like mistletoe. It’ll be a celebration of love.”

He chuckles.

“You’re so fucked up.”

“Said the pot to the kettle.”

And so it’s decided. Mallory can drift off to sleep with a clear mind now, dreaming of domesticity and the party they’ll be hosting three days before Easter, on the day of the Judas Kiss.

Sleep doesn’t come as easily for Michael. When it finally does, he dreams only of her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Sherlockisms in this chapter are the comparison of Satan to a spider and when Michael calls him "an abstract thinker." This is how Holmes refers to Moriarty in "The Final Problem." This chapter isn't my version of "Final Problem," though. That's still coming sometime. Millory needs some fluff and domesticity first. I was going to write a version of the Sherlock Christmas Special and make it a Victorian AU, but that would derail the plot too much.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this weird story! I value each and every piece of feedback more than you'll ever know.


	9. Judas Kiss

It finally feels like a New York spring in mid-April, but Mallory’s indoors, tuning up her Strad in the brownstone that she shares with one former Antichrist. Outside the window, a group of fashionable mothers are taking their kids across East 6th Street with their power-folding Origami strollers and Burberry diapers bags in tow. One mother waves at her through the glass, and her toddler follows suit. Mallory waves back at the pair, then picks up her violin and tucks it under her chin.

Such nice people, she thinks, and with such different lives than her own.

When Mallory’s not recovering from psychology finals and planning her major research project for the summer, she’s solving cases involving ghosts, demons, vampires, and other magical poxes on the city.

Correction: that _used_ to be her life until a few months ago. Since her return from New Orleans, there’s been very little of either school work or case work because Mallory has been a prisoner of the bedroom. Michael barely lets her come up for air.

When her roommate and colleague first told her he loved her, she cried ugly tears into the black satin bedspread. Anyone watching the scene would have thought that a horrible tragedy had occurred, but it was a dream come true, an enormous weight lifted off both their souls. While Mallory knew that there was more to his descent to Hell than he let on, it really felt like Satan had declared a truce with his son and halted his war on humanity.

There were no more dead souls hitching a ride back to the world of the living on the backs of resurrected witches. There were no more demonic possessions to strike terror into the families of the afflicted, believer and non-believer alike. Fewer vampires were being created now that Michael had destroyed their most notorious hives in the five boroughs. And even the ghosts that roamed the city on Halloween and haunted their respective abodes the rest of the year were little seen and heard, as if they too had received the message: _Leave Michael alone_.

How long would it last? Weeks? Months? Years? Mallory takes up the bow and strikes the first mournful note of Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor. It’s the piece that Michael asked her to play for him next, and she will, once she's practiced it to perfection.

At first, the request for _that_ particular Chopin struck her as odd. He’s never been happier in his life, so happy that his heart could burst and splatter the walls black, and yet all he wants her to play is sad music, and the sadder, the better.

Love has changed him. Has it changed her, too? Michael is still very much himself much of the time: arrogant, imperious, obsessed with the minutiae of paranormal crime, and barely able to restrain his darker impulses. When it’s just the two of them together in their own little world, however, he becomes hyper-focused on her. _Her_ pleasure, _her_ pain, _her_ needs, _her_ moods.

The violin sings with an almost human voice, deep and sonorous. Notes spill out of her beautifully made instrument in a kind of trance, and she’s so immersed in the music that she doesn’t hear him come in. Michael’s got her in his arms before she can react.

"Stop creeping around like Circe," she chides, but his grip on her waist only tightens. His large hands cup her breasts through the flimsy cotton of her shirt. He really can’t get enough of her, can he? It’s confirmed by the delicious ache left over from that night’s (and that morning’s) bedroom activities.

Mallory squirms in his embrace. If she's being totally honest with herself, there hasn’t been a single hour in the past two months that she hasn’t been acutely aware of the absolute ruin he’s made of her cunt. Seriously, her cunt is like the Roman Colosseum a couple of millennia after the last gladiatorial fights and Christian tortures were staged there, all crumbling and ruined and visited at all times of the day. It’s like Michael needs to reconquer it daily, hourly even, lest she forget who she really belongs to.

“I missed you,” he whispers in her ear, which is absurd.

“Don’t be silly. How can you miss me when you’ve been gone for less than ten minutes? And there’s no way that you bought everything we need for tomorrow in ten minutes. It’s literally impossible.

“Not if you have _these_.”

He leads her to the hallway, where a floating pair of red leather gloves is carrying four shopping bags through the door. It’s the same gloves that he wore to the opera what feels like a lifetime ago, only no one is wearing them now.

“It’ll be a cool party trick. Enchanting them to mix drinks at the bar.”

Mallory disagrees. The guest list is an eclectic mix of witches, Michael’s favorite clients, and those rare police types that he tolerates, so not all guests will be comfortable with open displays of magic. Creepy disembodied limbs are too weird for a party at Miss Robichaux’s, even, and Mallory’s sisters definitely like weird. Myrtle once enchanted the school so it snowed indoors for a winter wonderland “ball” that she threw in honor of the tricentennial celebration of a Russia united under the Romanovs.

Michael takes the shopping to the kitchen, beckoning the gloves to follow him. Mallory puts her Strad away in its velvet case and plops down on the sofa, exhausted, and it’s not even afternoon yet. By the time the guests start arriving tomorrow evening, the apartment will be spotless, but right now it looks like a cyclone hit their living room. Newspapers delivered the last three mornings litter the floor, trod underfoot like fallen leaves. As for Michael’s desk, every inch of it is covered with multicolored case files.

Mallory takes a peek at the nearest one and reads the word “cryptid,” followed by a six-digit number. There’s a huge map of the Eastern Seaboard hung on the wall next to the fireplace and perforated with blue and green push pins to indicate where the sightings took place. Red strings wound between the pins suggest the movement of the creatures, but the color-coding is a mystery. She’s about to ask Michael about it when he returns from the kitchen with two cups of green tea on a tray, but then she remembers something else.

“Behold and John Henry are in town for the Antiquarian Book Fair. Queenie texted me from New Orleans, thought we might get together.”

“Oh?” He feigns disinterest. In fact, he's so bothered by what she's telling him that he's picking up the newspapers off the floor and dumping them all on his desk, right over the case files. “Let me guess. They’re hunting for that newly discovered volume of Agrippa’s _Natural Magic_ , the one rumoured to contain a spell for bilocation scribbled in the margins in invisible ink. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.”

Mallory looks sceptical. How would he know what a sixteenth-century occultist did or did not scribble in the margins of a long-lost book (which, for all she knows, could be bound in human skin)?

“Wait, don’t tell me. Agrippa didn’t write the spell in the margins of this first edition because no witch or warlock in recorded history has ever managed to bilocate.”

“Excellent. Who said you were only good for performing exorcisms and—”

“ _Don’t finish that sentence_.”

His so-called joke earns him a swat from a rolled-up newspaper.

“If you really want to know, John Henry was pretty nice to me when we did that witch-warlock exchange a few years ago. I don’t suppose we could invite them to the party.”

“You ‘don’t suppose’ correctly,” he replies coolly, taking an elegant drag from his e-cig.

John Henry is the last person who’d want to see Michael surviving, let alone thriving, in the world. The warlocks were aghast when Cordelia opened her doors to him, and it didn’t matter one bit that a good chunk of the continent stood between Robichaux’s and Hawthorne’s. Change of heart or no, the Antichrist should be killed, not coddled, the warlocks argued. Not only was Cordelia’s attempt to reform him a gross miscarriage of justice, it was also a danger to the witches’ very existence and maybe that of the entire world as well. No one at Hawthorne dared to lift a finger against the Supreme, of course, but the chatter turned toxic and relations between the two covens became even more strained.

John Henry paid dearly for his early mistrust of the Boy Wonder. The very existence of a male with such powers had inflamed the misogyny of the Chancellor, who knew that his fellow teacher would be murdered while playing the Good Samaritan at a lonely gasp pump in the middle of the night. Before he could summon his magic, Ms. Mead slashed his ankles and throat, poured gasoline all over his body, and had herself a nice little bonfire. If it hadn’t been for Cordelia’s gifts as Supreme, John Henry would be nothing more than a scattering of ashes by the So Cal roadside. Mallory can’t blame the man for being a little bitter. In fact, it’s a good thing that she never knew Michael in those days. It would definitely color her perception of him now, no matter how much he’s changed.

“What if you met with him, privately, while he’s in New York?”

Now it’s Michael’s turn to nearly choke on his tea.

“To do what?”

“Apologize. It’s not a foreign concept.

He's truly dumbfounded. Apologizing isn’t something he’s ever done in all his life, despite all the regret he feels over past actions. Apologies won’t wake the dead. And what would one even mean to John Henry, a man who’s tasted death and won’t forget it till the day it reclaims him?

“You could say that you weren’t in your right mind and under the influence of a darker force. Or, you could admit your guilt. Tell John Henry that it’s not who you are, not anymore.”

Michael watches her in disbelief. The portrait that she paints of him is far too saintly for comfort. In her misguided affection, she’s given him a halo, and it’s an awkward fit, so luminous that it’s burning up his curls.

“It’s true, Michael! The coven sees it. I see it. You’ve helped countless people since you opened your consulting practice. Desperate, terrified people with nowhere to turn.”

“Forget it, Mal. It’d be a waste of time.”

“But—”

“Drop it. Just drop it.”

He’s so disturbed by this turn in the conversation that he strokes the cat a little too roughly. Spooked, Circe clambers down from his lap.

Mallory doesn’t enjoy twisting the knife. Far from it. She’s nothing like her lover in that respect. It’s just that she honestly believes that an apology would be therapeutic for all parties involved, even if neither party would ever consent to be in the same room together. She changes the subject.

“What’s the cryptid thing all about, anyway? I see that you’ve color-coded the sightings.”

“Oh, that? The blue pins are for fleshgaits.”

He's been thinking for a while about fleshgaits and other mysterious creatures who stalk the woods, looking for lone human prey. If they weren't on his radar before, they are now; the drop in paranormal crime rates in the city made him seek new hunting grounds. The fleshgaits are tricky. Hell seems to have no jurisdiction over the horrible things, and Mallory’s not even sure what they look like, or if they even look like anything in particular. They apparently like to wear the skin of their victims, though they can’t mimic their voices and movements well enough, which leads to a kind of uncanny effect.

“And the green?”

Michael's eyes are brighter, glowing a pale glacier blue. His excitement has grown so palpable that Mallory is suddenly jealous of the surely disgusting creature he’s tracking through Maryland.

“The green pins are for the Goatman.”

“The what?”

He puts his tea cup down on the table so he can amble over to her on the sofa, grabbing her by the striped black-and-yellow socks that make her small feet look like bumble bees. Mallory yelps as she’s pulled into his lap, but she doesn’t resist. His voice has turned jovial, though he's talking about monsters.

“The Goatman cometh, and humanity isn’t ready.”

“As long as I don’t have to go camping to find him.”

“How little you know about the Goatman. _You_ don’t find him. He finds _you_. And as for camping, why the hell not? It'll be so romantic, just you and me all alone in a tent, deep in the woods—”

“And the Goatman watching us?”

Michael gets a playful smack on the mouth when he exhales the vapour from his e-cig too close to her face. She tries to rip the device out of his hand but he holds it high over her head.

“Forget the Goatman, _this_ thing is disgusting. You promised to quit!”

“Come on, Mal. I’m too robust to be harmed by a little nicotine. And I _need_ it for the absolute nightmare of your party tomorrow.”

“ _Our_ party, Michael. We’re throwing it together. And it’s a celebration of _your_ beloved savior, Judas.”

“Whatever. I still can’t believe we’re throwing one.”

He throws back his head and blows a column of smoke into the air. His mouth curves into an “O” shape so perfectly pink and plush that Mallory can’t help running a finger down the crease in his bottom lip. A sly tongue darts out to taste her finger before he captures the whole digit between his teeth. Tossing his e-cig over his shoulder, he pulls her down against his hardness by grabbing big handfuls of her ass.  

“Don’t be a spoilsport. You don’t mean that about the party, which we’ve been planning for weeks.”

It’s getting harder to concentrate when he releases her finger from his mouth so he can kiss a line from her wrist down her arm, savoring the soft skin all the way to the crook of her elbow.  

“We could celebrate in private,” he mumbles between kisses. “All we need is a bottle of red wine and a sprig of olive to take us back to the garden of Gethsemane on the night before the crucifixion.”

She sighs. And she’s worked so hard on getting the guest list just right. So far, sex is the only thing that has worked fairly reliably to keep the party on and Michael in good spirits. It may be low, but it's a way to keep him open-minded to such distasteful prospects as people traipsing through his home with their shoes on or the same people engaging him in talk of something horrible like the weather or the stock market.

“So, have we decided?”

“Decided what?”

“When people are kissing under the olive sprigs.”

He looks at her dumbly, with lust clouding his pale eyes. It’s inconceivable that she’s still thinking about the party. His hands are moving under her shirt and his lips travelling up her neck, while the cock straining his pants is now resting against her thigh.

“Who cares? Let the people kiss whenever they want, or not. These are people, not Barbie dolls, Mal. You can’t make them kiss.”

“No one _has_ to kiss, Michael. Help me out here.”

She grabs hold of his hand over her shirt, but no force in the world can pry it away. He only squeezes harder in response, kneading her breast like it's a small loaf of bread.

“Okay, fine. We kiss at midnight.”

He’s got to be kidding.

“Midnight. Like on New Year’s Eve.”

When Mallory looks sad at the prospect of this bastardized holiday they’ve invented looking too much like a mix of other, better known holidays, Michael pulls her close, cupping her face with both hands.

“ _Hey_. It’s when the kiss actually happened. I don’t make the rules.”

“Midnight,” she mutters. She can live with midnight. At least they won’t be playing with sparklers or watching the ball drop on Times Square.

Now that the matter of the JUDAS KISS™ has been settled, they can do some practice of their own. Mallory finally gives in to his advances and raises her arms so he can pull her shirt over her head.

The truth is that, no matter how many times he’s seen her tits, the novelty never wears off. It’s like a miracle of nature, seeing how they fit so perfectly in his palms, with their perfect pink tips just asking to be licked and sucked, begging to be worshipped. And so he does just that as she wraps her arms around his head to draw him closer. Grinding her pussy down on his crotch, she can feel the outline of his trapped cock. She grinds some more, until she hears him groan in complaint, lips still latched on her nipple.

She wants more. Soon, what they’re doing won’t be enough to satisfy the burning need to be filled that she feels almost constantly now. Her fingers dig into his scalp. She tugs on his hair, hard.

_More._

It's time to discard the rest of their clothes. Michael lifts her off his lap so he can strip off her purple sweatpants. She pulls on his sweater roughly and earns a whine for her trouble when a button that she didn't even notice was there snags on a golden curl. He’s vain enough to object when someone “interferes” with his crowning glory.

Mallory laughs as she escapes to the other side of the sofa. Eyes half shut, Michael looks confused for a moment. Then his gaze turns murderous.

“Come here.”

She’s still wearing her panties, but not for much longer. Next thing she knows, he’s ripped them in half with his magic. Whenever that happens, and it happens a lot, he just reminds her that she’s got ten more packs of the darned lacy things. Michael knows that kind of information because he’s always squirrelling away the worn ones, carrying them around like comfort objects to be sniffed for spiritual sustenance. She’s even seen him tuck her worn panties into the breast pocket of his Prada suit like they’re some kind of silk handkerchief. It’d be kind of disgusting if it wasn’t so cute.

“I said, _come here_.”

He’s speaking very slowly and evenly, which is never a good sign. Yet she’s staying exactly where she is, just out of his reach. He’s got no choice but to grab her by the feet and pull her towards him. This time, she doesn’t end up on his lap. Instead, he’s got her laying flat on her back, totally naked, when he parts her thighs wide and commands her, more forcefully now, to keep them open. This is hard to do because she’s glistening wet, dripping on the velvet cushions, and it makes her self-conscious, as does the way that Michael stares at it, mesmerized, frozen in his tracks. This is another part of her anatomy that never loses its novelty.

Experimentally, she closes her legs. If looks could kill, she’d be dead from the one he gives her.

“You know what happens to bad girls who don’t follow commands?”

“They get fucked?”

Michael tries to be a strict disciplinarian and everything, but his punishments are usually more like rewards. Normally, he’d play like he wasn’t going to give her what she wanted, at least not right away. Today, however, his self-control is worn dangerously thin. Perhaps it’s the coy look she gives him as she defies his commands. Perhaps it’s her scent that’s driving him mad. Whatever it is, he can’t afford to waste any time playing games.

He pries her legs open and probes her entrance with a finger as he kisses the inside of her thigh. His face is rough against the delicate skin as he hasn’t shaved in the last few days, probably in protest of the party. It creates a delicious friction when he finally dives face-first into her cunt like it’s a glittering swimming pool in the dog days of summer.

Mallory dissolves into pure bliss, all worries about tomorrow gone from her mind. To get in as deep as he can with his tongue, Michael grips her hips so hard that she'll see big manly handprints the next day. It’s unbearable, the way he opens her up to devour the precious essence inside, and the way his stubble feels against her most intimate area, and the way his teeth graze her clit before he flicks it with his tongue while inserting two fingers into her slippery cunt. Craning her neck, she watches his golden head move for a moment or two before dropping her head back on the cushion and closing her eyes. His mouth continues its furious work on her clit as his fingers curl deep inside her folds, reaching for the spongy flesh that’s like magic when you touch it because it makes her unravel so sweetly.

Mallory cums quickly, after two solid minutes of this treatment, alternated with harsh sucking on her clit. His orgasm is more intense than usual, accompanied by an unexpected gush of fluid.

Oops.

The feeling washes over like Hokusai’s _Great Wave_ swallowing up those tiny fishing boats in the print—thunderously, with all the force of an erotic tsunami—and she really thinks she’ll black out for a moment there. It’s happened before, blacking out from the sensory overload to which Michael subjects her body. This time, she merely drenches his face, which he seems to like, judging from the way he wipes his chin with his fingers and then licks them clean.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he pants when he finally comes up for air. Then he crawls up her body and pulls her into a crushing kiss so she can taste herself on his lips. “Your body is literally magic. You find a new way to amaze me every day.”

Last time she “amazed” him, she deduced the unlikely culprit of a witch crime. This time, it’s another part of her body doing the "amazing," her brain having been blown out her ear by the force of a single orgasm.

But it’s not enough for Michael, not by a long shot.

“Let’s see if you can do it again from a different position.”

The position he has in mind has her on his lap and riding him until they cum together. Mallory is lifted up as if she’s no heavier than a doll so his cock can align with her entrance. They stay still like that for a moment or two, but Michael always favors the unexpected move: he uses the tip of his cock to coax her folds open with the lightest of touches before impaling her with no warning.

If she were any less wet, it would be painful to be split in half so suddenly; but her cunt is needy enough that it’s practically thanking his dick for the privilege of being so thoroughly stretched. They soon establish a rhythm that’s half Mallory bouncing up and down and half Michael thrusting up from below while holding her by the throat, careful not to apply too much pressure to her windpipe. She moans louder than she has in a while, primed by her wet orgasm for new heights of pleasure.

A meow is heard from the corner of the room. All this wet slapping and moaning has attracted the attention of Mallory’s cat, who’s been watching them for a while. Her human can’t be bothered to care, though; it’s not like the cat understands what she’s seeing, and if she feels any jealousy, it’s because she’s excluded from play.

Poor Circe! She’s seen a lot of things in the bedroom, and outside it, because there isn’t a surface in the apartment that she and Michael haven’t fucked on, under, or against.

Mallory has negative interest in interior design, for example, and yet she’s become deeply familiar with the make and model of her own kitchen cupboards and electric appliances from all the times that Michael has bent her over the table and pounded into her like the world was on fire and not just his French toast.

They’ve fucked standing up before the full-length mirror in her bedroom, then hung another such mirror from the ceiling so they could watch themselves fucking horizontally as well as vertically and diagonally.

Michael then got the idea to visit Coney Island in the off season and sneak into the old fun house so they could fuck in front of a whole wall of mirrors that distorted their reflections in every which way. This bit of foolishness inspired them to sneak into the American Museum of Natural History after closing time so that Mallory could get on her knees under the massive Titanosaur skeleton in the fossil hall and take his cock into her mouth, as if reenacting the nearby diorama of the giant squid fighting the sperm whale.

At the MoMA, Michael decorated her chest with ropey spurts of cum in front of the largest painting by Jackson Pollock, dripping like he was the Abstract Expressionist and she the flood-bound canvas. They even pushed their luck on a bench in Central Park in the small hours of the morning, with only the junkies and trash collectors for company, and when they didn’t get arrested by dawn, they defiled their local cinema with a matinee showing of _Hereditary_.

Circe meows again. Mallory suppresses a moan as Michael pistons into her with a devilish fury that brings her ever-closer to release. Two large hands are wrapped around her throat now, grip faltering because Michael is overcome by his senses too—by the way that her walls seem to contract around him to meet a particularly violent upward thrust, or the way that her moans resonate in her chest as if her whole body is a wind instrument he’s playing by ear.  

At the highest pitch of her pleasure, she cums a second time, bathing his cock in more of that sweet fluid he's so eager to coax out of her now. And when he cums shortly after, they ride out the aftershocks together, bodies conjoined like they don’t want to be parted ever again.

A half-hour of cuddling later, Michael is back in his armchair, smoking his e-cig in a velvet robe that makes Mallory think of Hugh Hefner. Hair rumpled like a schoolboy’s and brow still sweaty, he’s looking at the map on the wall, with all its push-pins and red strings. Mallory is sprawled on the now-dry sofa with her eyes closed, wearing only her socks and a blissful smile.

Five little words shatter her reverie.

“The rope will arrive tomorrow.”

Her eyes fly open. Her brain takes a moment to catch up.

“The rope?”

“All two hundred and fifty feet of it, to be exact.”

_Oh._

The rope is for their foray into _shibari_ , the Japanese form of tight binding, which they’ve been planning to do for weeks. Michael ordered it direct from its Tokyo manufacturer “for the authenticity,” though Mallory can’t tell one kind of triple-twisted hemp rope from another.

“Already? Did they expedite it? Wait, _two hundred and fifty feet_?? What am I, a herd of buffaloes?”

“You’ll be suspended from a exposed beam, Mal. I want you to be comfortable so we can try multiple positions.”

She swallows, hard. Comfort is a such a relative term. She’ll be suspended in bindings tight enough to leave compression marks on her soft skin. She’ll be fully restrained, unable to move an inch, totally in his power. A warming tingle spreads through her nether regions at the thought. Will she be cumming a third time in the same hour?

First, however, they need to get through tomorrow’s party.

*****

 

Mrs. Hudson is the first to arrive. That the vampiric landlady lives upstairs is something that Mallory didn’t know for the first six months she lived here. Michael certainly didn’t tell her, and her own detective skills had to improve before she could figure it out for herself.

Vampires like privacy, and Mrs. Hudson is more private than most, especially during lean feeding season when she needs to maintain several walls between herself and her neighbours. That is doubly true for a powerful witch whose blood has revivifying properties for her kind.

“Hello, darlings,” the older lady practically sings as she comes through the front door with an enormous _charcouterie_ plate in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. “How are you two managing? Haven’t burned the place down, I hope.”

Judging from her matronly tone, you’d think they were young children playing house, barely able to care for themselves, let alone host a party. Seeing the bunches of olive branches in every doorway makes her frown.

_You crazy kids and your Judas party._

As Michael takes the dish and bottle, he gives Mallory a pointed look: _There goes your vegetarian menu._ It’s not like she can object to the meaty content of a dish that her secretive landlady has so lovingly prepared, especially as said landlady needs blood from living human beings in order to survive. When the older woman has fed from a blood bank, or wherever she obtains her supply (Mallory knows better than to ask), she’s perfectly pleasant to be around.

“So, how can I help you dolls get ready for your first party?”

“The last thing we want is to put you out,” Mallory begins, not liking the determined crease that’s deepening between her landlady’s dark eyebrows. “Please take a seat in a living room and Michael will pour you a drink.”

“Nonsense,” says Mrs. Hudson, pushing her way into the dining room where Michael set up the snacks table and the bar. She casts a critical eye over everything, already full of opinions.

“The porcelain is beautiful. Where did you get these plates?

“They belonged to Ms. Mead.”

“I see.” She expected them to be Mallory’s family heirlooms and now finds the exchange awkward. “Well, I’m never one to speak ill of the dead, so I’ll say that she had exquisite taste.”

She really didn’t, thinks Mallory as she brings out the cut vegetables and a selection of dips and puts them in the middle of the table, only to have her landlady move them to the side with the less popular snacks. Her own arrangement of cured meats on a cutting board gets pride of place, and Mallory doesn’t have the heart to argue. Even if she did, Mrs. Hudson would pretend to agree, then do it her own way when no one was looking.

The older woman checks to see if the bar has everything they need: pour spouts for measuring drinks, strainers for shaking and stirring cocktails, glasses of every type, ice trays, paring knives for the lime wedges, mixers like soda water and ginger ale, and a blood bag or two in the bar-fridge to mix with her own cocktails. She’s pleasantly surprised that all the essentials are there, and when she wonders aloud if the hosts will be pouring and mixing all the drinks themselves, Michael animates the red gloves and shows them how to shake a cocktail until it’s frothy.

Mallory can’t believe that the gloves are still a thing.

“You said that that we wouldn’t use them! They’ll creep the guests out.”

Mrs. Hudson disagrees.

“It’ll be marvellous! When it's you two hosting the party, people expect a little, how to put it—”

“Please don’t say, ‘Satanic zing.’”

"—occult gusto."

The doorbell rings just as Mrs. Hudson is rearranging all the other dishes on the table. Mallory goes to open the door. It’s Coco St.-Pierre Vanderbilt, looking festive in a silver sheath dress and a Dom Perignon Rosé tucked under a bejewelled arm.

“Oh, Coco, you shouldn’t have.”

“I love your crown! Very witchy.”

“Thanks.”

Mallory’s wearing a tiara of golden laurel leaves over her loose long waves and a billowing black chiffon dress cinched at the waist with a golden belt. It’s meant to evoke spring and the renewal of nature, only with a slight gothic flair. Despite the thought she put into her outfit, she feels a little under-dressed next to Michael in his burgundy cravat from another century and matching three-piece suit. And now Coco has arrived, looking like a disco ball to upstage them all.

Soon, all sorts of guests are ringing the doorbell. By the first hour, all the main categories are present and accounted for: witches, clients, and law enforcement. No one was invited from her college, as Mallory likes to keep her witchy identity strictly under wraps. Mrs. Hudson is still the only person in the miscellaneous category, and is likely to stay that way, unless something more exotic than a vampire shows up uninvited.

“Are you doing okay?” Michael asks her once the apartment starts to fill up with juicy, blood-filled bodies. The landlady is standing in the worst possible spot, sandwiched between two powerful witches and half-swaying to some sultry music that Mallory doesn’t remember putting on the playlist. Were Michael’s musical choices that bad? Someone rigged the iPod to play D’Angelo’s _Black Messiah_ album from start to finish.

On Mrs. Hudson’s left stands Dr. Dominique Aguillard, a paediatric oncologist from Harlem and local practitioner of healing voodoo. She’s here with her new fiancée who works at the same hospital. On her right is none other than Marie Laveau, the reigning voodoo queen back from the dead and now living in Brooklyn, where she leads a new coven and runs three upscale hair salons.

The two women have slightly different reactions when they first see Mallory. Dominique hugs her fellow witch right away and compliments her dress and tiara, but Marie looks at her more warily. Does she hate her outfit? Or is she suspicious about Mallory being the future Supreme? Maybe it’s about that mess with the witch hunters down in New Orleans—a mess that Michael asked her to clean up so as not to get his own hands dirtier than they already were. But that can’t be it. To add insult to injury, Marie’s eyes turn warm and twinkly when she spies the “white devil” himself rounding the corner with two glasses.

“A gin on the rocks for the healer.” He slips the drink into the doctor’s hand. “And a Diet Sprite for the queen.”

 _The queen?_ Mallory is immediately jealous of the title, though she knows it’s a literal one.

On receiving the drink, Marie smiles, and why shouldn’t she? This man rescued her from an afterlife of prodding the La Lauries with hot pokers, so the least she could do was kill a witch hunter or twenty. 

“What are we celebrating, exactly?” Dominique looks curiously at the décor, which consists of olive branches and the occasional apostolic symbol of Judas—a money purse—hung in the doorways and windows. “Corporate greed? The Mediterranean coastline? It can’t be Good Friday, which doesn’t start for another three hours.”

As Michael explains the weird holiday they’ve invented, she spots an unexpected guest in the living room, admiring the damask silk drapes. It’s Andre Stevens. Next to him stands a bleached-blonde man in a black leather vest.

She frowns. Why did Andre come to the party at all? Better yet, why did Mallory invite Andre to the party? The dislike between him and Michael is mutual, even leaning towards hatred on the client’s side, and she wouldn’t put it past her lover to dislike someone simply because of his own guilty conscience.

Indeed, Mallory kept in touch with the gallerist partly out of her own sense of guilt over how things turned out with his mother. Bad blood was inevitable when Michael let the former voodoo queen leave for California after revealing her to have killed Stu, her son’s con-artist of a boyfriend, and then cooperated with a demon—admittedly, through no real choice of her own—to frame a fellow witch for the murders of several prominent socialites.

Mallory absolutely hated how that case turned out. What would she have done in Michael’s place, though? Killed Dinah Stevens and sent her soul to Papa Legba? The woman did what she did out of love for her only son. Still, there must’ve been a better option than “banishing” her to the other side of the continent to chase her dreams of hosting a talk show. The truth is that Michael has a soft spot for the "bad" ones, always hoping they'll reform.

No—all her detective insights are telling her there’s an ulterior motive behind Andre’s coming to the party. She goes to investigate.

“There she is!” Andre finally notices her. “Let me introduce you.”

His boyfriend runs a salon in the Meatpacking district. She makes a mental note to introduce this man to Marie Laveau, given their mutual interests.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Gallant.” 

Mr. Gallant takes her hand graciously.

“You have a lovely apartment, Mallory,” he says Gallant between sips of his cocktail through a straw. “We’ve been admiring your… what are they called?” He turns to the other man for help.

“Original carved-wood mouldings and exposed beamwork,” supplies Andre. Gallant nods, but the way he does it tells Mallory that he doesn’t give a shit about architecture and interior design. If she had to guess, she’d say that Andre’s new boyfriend had a wild streak that the gallerist was trying to tame.

Mallory casts her eye around for Michael as they chat, but there’s no sign of him. There’s also no clue yet as to why Andre chose to come. Taking a sip of her gin and tonic, Mallory works up the courage to ask how the new couple met. 

“It’s kind of a funny story,” Andre says. “Should I tell it? Or do you want to—”

“No, I like the way you tell it.”

Mallory’s heart does a tumble in her chest at the way the men smile at each other. It’s the night of the Judas kiss, and love is in the air.

Where _is_ Michael anyway? She misses him.

“A friend of mine came by the gallery about a month ago, said he knew this super cute guy. Well, this _guy_ had reservations at the Black Pearl, a seafood restaurant on the brink of failure. It’s closed since then.”

“Why?”

“Because it served the worst lobster rolls you’ve ever tasted, and I mean, the absolute _worst_.”

Mallory looks at them funny. Why would anyone pick a place like that for a first date?

“Okay, so on the night Gallant made the reservation, the place was being filmed for an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. That’ll be fun for a first date, we thought. So we pull up to the place and there are cameras everywhere. Crewmen are swarming the dining room, chefs are leaving the kitchen to scream at the wait staff, and Gordon—”

When Andre dissolves into laughter, Gallant must continue the story.

“You should have seen Gordon, Mallory. Our lobster rolls were brought to the table, a Maine roll for me and a Connecticut roll for Andre. And just as we took our first _disgusting_ bites, we hear something about stopping the service, a man shouting like a Highlander to another Highlander on the next hill over. It’s Gordon, and he’s coming straight for our table, picking up our plates and tossing them in the trash.”

“What happened next?”

“That’s when the crew shuffled everyone out of the restaurant so he could deal with the chefs. But if you watch the episode, you’ll see that it ends with him pushing Chef Mike out the window.”

Michael appears behind them at that exact moment, as if he’s been eavesdropping on the conversation from across the room, and it only just got interesting. Did he transmute? Mallory wouldn’t be surprised.

“You witnessed a murder? Did you report it?”

“What? No! ‘Chef Mike’ is what Gordon calls the microwave.” Gallant laughs. “Microwaves are his arch nemesis on his reality show.”

Without another word to Gallant and Andre, Michael turns his back and walks away. There’s nothing appealing about anything he’s just heard, especially the words “reality show.” If Michael deigns to watch a television show at all, it’s either about true crime or Vincent Price is hosting it.

“Allow me to apologize on his behalf,” Mallory grits through her teeth. Her roommate is already misbehaving, and he hasn’t even had a single drink. If this get any worse, there'll be no shibari tonight.

“No need,” Andre replies helpfully. He knows what he’s dealing with. Only Gallant looks mildly offended.

Mallory’s watching Michael move between groups of people on the other side of the living room, trying to choose one that will bore him least. He finally stops by the fireplace to greet a client whom Mallory has never met, though she recognizes her from the pictures in her case file. The two men notice her noticing.

“Who’s that striking woman Michael’s talking to, the one dressed in all black?”

“That’s Lilith.”

Mallory knows the case file well. Lilith was a goth cam girl who used to stream out of her NYU dorm room, which was risky enough on its own without performing dark rituals to make it more interesting. One day, while searching for ways to make her cam show more lucrative, Lilith summoned the lust demon Asmodeus live on camera, using nothing more than a scented candle, a pile of used condoms, a few escort ads cut from the back of the free newspaper, and the blood of a slaughtered chicken. The views on her channel skyrocketed, but it wasn’t all a bed of roses and daffodils and getting fucked into next Tuesday by nine-inch demon dick. If it hadn’t been for Michael, Lilith would’ve been kicked out of college when Asmodeus turned most of her dormitory into his own personal harem.

All eyes are on Marie Laveau as she comes sauntering over, dressed in a column of black silk. Her silver bracelets tinkle as she tosses her long braids over her shoulder. Gallant looks too intimidated to speak, but Andre knows her already.

“How’ve you been, my boy? I would send my well-wishes to your poor ailing mother, but you’re not on speaking terms. Papa Legba must be rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of acquiring such a fine specimen for his antechamber of horrors.”

 _And there it is_. The reason why Andre came to gloat.

From what Mallory is able to piece together, Dinah Stevens had a streak of bad luck from the second she stepped foot off the plane in LA to the moment the sound stage collapsed around her during the taping of the pilot episode of “Dinah!”

“She’ll be fine.” Her son sounds disappointed. “My mother can survive anything. Though her show failing before it has a chance to air may just kill her.”

Marie chortles into her Sprite. The obvious warmth and camaraderie between the younger man and ageless woman tells Mallory that Andre may have found a new mother figure in the voodoo queen, and she’d be really happy for them if it weren’t for the weird surge of sympathy she feels for Dinah.

Halfway across the room, Michael has moved on from Lilith and is now talking to two official-looking types, a man and a woman, both of whom Mallory recognizes. A fourth person, Coco, just joined the conversation.

“Coco, this is Detective Gabriel Estrada of the Fighting Ninth. That’s what we call our local police precinct.” Michael only makes the introduction when he gets a quick nudge in the ribs from Mallory. “Detective, this is Coco St.-Pierre Vanderbilt, our favorite witch of the Upper East Side.”

It’s a backhanded compliment because Michael despises the Upper East Side, and there’s only one witch there. But Coco smiles and extends her hand to the handsome detective, who brings it up to his lips like it’s a delicate flower.

“Ms. Vanderbilt, how do you do? Always a pleasure to meet a witch, especially one as lovely as you are.”

“Oh, stop,” gushes the heiress. “I’m hardly a witch. More like a glorified gluten detector!”

The woman standing next to Detective Estrada is Dr. Holly Cooper, a forensic pathologist who works for the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Mallory’s already met her down at the morgue, but she’s never seen her out of her white lab coat and in a body-conscious dress with red lipstick to match. She doesn't have to be a detective to know that the good doctor has a little crush on Michael. This is confirmed when he runs a possessive hand down Mallory’s back and she freezes, as if shot by a stun gun.

Interesting. The pathologist didn’t know they were together. Then again, most of the guests here had no clue before tonight. In a way, this is their debut as a couple.

“As I was saying,” Michael continues, ignoring the sexual tension crackling in the air all around him, “it’s a huge mistake to theorize in advance of the facts. You begin to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

“What’s your theory about Baskerville, then?”

“I don’t have one, Detective. There’s not enough data to theorize.”

Henry Baskerville, the only heir to an immense aeronautical fortune, has two extracurricular interests that they know of. His first interest is in cults; some would say that he runs one out of the isolated chateau in the Catskills where he’s been spending all his leisure time lately rather than snorting coke off models on a Mediterranean yacht.

Baskerville’s second interest is cryptids.

“What do you mean there’s not enough data to theorize? I’m telling you that Baskerville has disappeared off the face of the Earth. That forest took him, or something in that forest, and the board is covering it up to keep the stock from plummeting.” Estrada is talking very fast now, clearly unhappy with how Michael’s reacting to the news, but what else is new? “You surprise me, Langdon. With speculation all over the paranormal blogs, one would assume you’d be first on the scene.”

Michael looks a little sheepish. The quick squeeze he gives to Mallory’s ass goes unnoticed by Estrada and Coco, who are beginning to notice each other, but not by Holly Cooper, who is wiping off her red lipstick with a napkin.

“I’ve been… engaged in other pursuits.”

“And what might those be? Paranormal crime is at all time low.” Estrada is genuinely curious. “I wonder why that is.”

“Yeah, Michael,” Mallory gives him a pointed look. “Why are there so few ‘special’ crimes these days?”

Just in time, Estrada changes the subject.

“Ms. Vanderbilt, we’re being so rude, talking shop around you. You should know that Michael has been an invaluable help on any and all paranormal cases we’ve had in the last few years. Though he is a bit of a theorist at times, his head all up in the clouds, whereas down at the precinct, we do real police work, the nitty-gritty of—”

“You’re forgetting, Detective, what an utter mess the police made of the Livingstone case last October.”

“Livingstone?” Coco’s all ears. “As in, the Livingstones of Park Avenue? They’re close relatives of the Vanderbilts.”

Michael knew. That’s why he mentioned that particular case. Estrada stiffens.

“What are you talking about? The hauntings stopped in early November.”

“Do you know why they stopped?”

“I don’t. Why does it matter?”

“It matters because the ghosts in question haven’t been seen or heard from since. And you didn’t even notice.”

Estrada is feeling the heat now.

“Is there any point you wish to emphasize?”

Michael thinks for a moment about how best to deliver the humiliating blow. “Oh, just a tiny little thing. You could call it the curious incident of the ketchup heiress’s ghost in the night-time, at Bergdorf Goodman.”

“What are you talking about? There was no ghost at Bergdorf Goodman that night!”

“That was the curious incident.”

The professional detective is still confused. The amateur one puts a patronizing hand on his shoulder, and Estrada is mortified because Coco’s watching it all.

“The date was October 31. Tell me, if you’re a ghost and it’s Halloween, are you staying on that little scrap of land you’re bound to haunt for the rest of eternity? Of course not. And where do you go if you’ve collected Lanvin couture your whole life and there’s a brand new ready-to-wear line in stock at your favorite department store?”

“Bergdorf Goodman.”

“Precisely.”

“I see. So, the ghosts of New York are disappearing. But is that such a bad thing?”

“Not if you don’t think of ghosts as people. They’ve got the same right to live in peace as the more corporeally advantaged among us. The question is, who, or what, is powerful enough to interfere with ghosts and their bindings?”

Estrada doesn’t answer. Quite frankly, he’s unable to keep up with the speed and arcane directionality of Michael’s way of thinking.

“In the best case scenario? Someone with a kind heart and very advanced magical skills is releasing the ghosts to their final resting places. There are only a handful of witches alive today who are capable of the feat, and a third of them live in New Orleans.”

“And what’s the worst case scenario?”

Michael rubs his hands. Worst case scenarios are his specialty.

“Someone is kidnapping the ghosts to siphon off their energy and store it like some kind of battery.”

“Who would want to do that?”

Mallory feels a tug on her sleeve. It’s Coco, asking where the bathroom is. She’s feeling neglected now that Estrada is engrossed in crime talk and not flirting with her.

“I’ll take you.”

When they’re halfway to the bathroom, the heiress squeezes Mallory’s hand and pulls her close.

“Is Detective Estrada single? Please say he’s single.”

“Like a packet of bright orange cheese.”

“Good. I’m going to need another Pinot Grigio. And a breath mint.” She rifles through her purse but comes up empty. “They’re in my jacket. I’ll be right back.”

Coco goes to the hallway to find her jacket. Her head is starting to swim a little from the wine, but the prospect of getting to know the cute detective keeps her giddy and grounded. When she first got the invitation, she wondered what kind of people would be there. Thankfully, it's not whole roomfuls of ghouls and edgelords. She was pleasantly to see normal people at the party, even cute people with whom she might want to get better acquainted. After deciding to wait a few months before enrolling at Miss Robichaux’s in the wake of the Vitalum scandal, she’s had trouble connecting to the witchy community in New York, and her usual socialite crowd has been boring her lately. Who is she? Where does she belong? Maybe this detective will help her find out.

Right as Coco’s popping a mint for her second sally at Estrada, a knock at the front door startles her. She’s turning the doorknob when a wave of sickness washes over her suddenly; it’s a feeling of utter nothingness that’s somehow worse than the deepest, darkest despair.

She hesitates before opening the door. She really shouldn’t be doing this.

“Hello?”

Two adolescents stand outside the door, a girl and a boy. They can’t be more than twelve or thirteen years old, yet their clothes are all wrong, like they’ve stepped out of a sepia-toned photograph taken over a century earlier. The boy wears a tie knotted over a starched collar and the girl a pleated skirt and sailor blouse with a frilly collar. Their heads are lowered and their arms hang awkwardly at their sides. They speak with one voice.

“May we come in?”

Coco gapes at the two kids. The weirdly hollow sound of their voices gives her goose bumps. She doesn’t need to be a witch gifted with intuition for danger to know that something is off. As if sensing her fear, the girl takes a step forward.

“Please, Ma’am,” she begs, yet also sounds impatient with Coco, like she’s not complying with her wishes fast enough. “We got separated from our mother in the store. We just need to use your phone to call her.”

Have either of these kids ever seen a phone?

The boy looks warily at the threshold, as if he needs an invitation to cross it. When her raises his head, Coco tries to scream but the sound dies in her throat. His eyes are pitch black.

“Our mother will worry herself sick. Please let us in.”

“Uh… Michael?”

Coco can’t move. The host is several rooms away and can’t possibly hear her. While no earthly force can compel her to grant the children’s request if she doesn’t want to, something's keeping her at the door, rooting her feet on the spot and dangling the invitation on the tip of her tongue.

_Fuck me._

Coco understands that she’s in trouble. She’s not as stupid as she looks. If she doesn’t move her feet from where the creatures have planted them soon, her tongue will slip and they’ll gain access to the apartment. The girl is now looking up at her too, and her eyes are the same: pupils, irises, and sclera are all the colour of pitch, the dark night of the soul.

When Coco opens her mouth, it’s not to scream but to curse.

“Eat shit, you creepy fucks! Your mother can eat shit too for dressing you like rejects from that Breaking Amish show, in that stupid frilly collar and those buckled pilgrim shoes, and—”

“Don’t panic.”

Michael has materialized beside her, transmuted from the kitchen on the gut instinct that something was wrong. The look he gives the children is one of exasperation.

“You know these things?”

“All too well.”

The "children" disperse when he flashes his own black eyes, which only come out to play once in a blood moon (sometimes in the bedroom, to Mallory’s chagrin).

“What’s going on here?” Mrs. Hudson has come around to see what all the commotion is about. She knows immediately who knocked on the door from the look of abject terror on Coco’s face. She glares at Michael. “I told you to have a priest over.”

“The Black-Eyed Kids are not that kind of problem.”

“You keep saying that, yet won’t tell me the kind of problem they are. Come, my dear,” she speaks soothingly to the witch, handing her a tissue from her apron, which she’s inexplicably wearing, like she’s spent most of the party in the kitchen.

Coco follows her to the bathroom, where she sits at the edge of bathtub to have her makeup fixed. She can’t shake the feeling that she could have handled that incident better, what with being a witch at all. What’s the use of sensing danger if you can’t face it bravely?

Mrs. Hudson is in a complaining kind of mood.

“Honestly, I’m at my wits end. I’ve tried burning sage and hanging crucifixes and sprinkling garlic on the fire escape. I even put holy water into a spray bottle to clean the landing. Nothing works! They’re worse than the bed bugs, those things, and you know what a nightmare bedbugs have been in this godforsaken borough of ours.” She lowers her to voice to a whisper. “Giuliani could have handled it, but de Blasio isn’t doing shit.”

“About what? The bedbugs?”

“The BEKs, my dear.”

In the living room, Mallory is refreshing her own gin and tonic, which she shouldn’t be doing anyway, as mixing and pouring drinks is the job of the animate gloves. The pair is otherwise occupied, however. Marie needs her neck massage, which is somehow more important than the drinks. She spots Coco coming back into the living room, but she’s not looking for Estrada. What happened? Mrs. Hudson has an arm around her shoulders, and she’s looking mildly upset. Mallory can’t hear what Coco is saying—someone has hijacked the playlist again and is blasting “Dreamer Deceiver” by Judas Priest so it drowns out nearly everything—but her landlady’s voice carries over the din with no problem.

“Did you see the sign outside that reads _No Cultists_? You’d think that would deter the cultists, but they still come. It’s like we’re the Empire State Building of Satanism or something. Next, they’ll be rating us on Yelp.”

And we’d get zero stars, thinks Mallory, given the chilly reception any Satanist receives around these parts.

Coco is soon looking calmer ad looking for Estrada again. The detective is talking to a group of Michael’s clients, ones that Mallory hasn’t met but recognizes from pictures. Lilith, the cam girl, is there, and so is a man whom she recognizes as the owner of a haunted bodega, and another man whose doppelganger stalked him across several continents. The third man is an international playboy whose sexual escapades led him to contract an STD from an incubus. How this happened, nobody knows. Michael still hasn’t cracked that particular case.

“Hey, Mal.” It’s Andre again. “We have a problem.”

“What?”

She sounds impatient, like the buzz from the drink hasn’t hit her yet.

With a shaky hand, Gallant thrusts his phone in her face.

“We were taking some pictures of your _stunning_ damask silk drapes—”

“—seriously, you _must_ tell us where you got that brocade, and in that burgundy-gold pattern too, with the ruched valence,” Andre gushes. His boyfriend may be spooked by whatever’s on that phone, but as the son of a former voodoo queen, he’s seen worse.

“—when _this_ appeared on the fire escape.”

Mallory squints at the blurry image. A male BEK is standing outside the window with his nose pressed against the glass and his depthless eyes staring into the camera in a way that makes you never want to go to sleep again.

“Most children are little monsters, but that’s beyond the pale.”

“Did you let it in?”

Andre looks horrified by the suggestion. Gallant’s face is as white as his bleached waves.

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

“What happens if you let it in?”

“Ask Michael.”

“We tried to, but no one can find him anywhere.”

“You’re kidding.”

He wouldn’t dare. Or would be? There is a definite possibility that Michael has grown so sick of his own party that he left the premises altogether. What’s more likely, though, is that he’s hiding in the storage room with all the accursed items they had to remove from the shelves out of fear that people would touch them. If she had to guess, he’s taken his e-cig and a bottle of whiskey and buried his nose in some arcane tome on necromancy or astral projection or the best way to turn people into mindless puppets.

She goes to look. Sure enough, there’s candlelight coming from behind a pile of boxes.

“Michael?”

No answer.

“I can’t believe you’re hiding in here, like a little baby. Behind Annabelle.” The doll is so possessed with pure evil that she’s encased in bullet-proof glass and covered with a blanket. “Maybe we should take Annabelle out of her display case so you can play with her?”

The candle snuffs out.

“I deserved that.”

She can’t see his face in the dark but can imagine the exact look on it from the overly dramatic tone of voice. She’s conflicted. Does she comfort him or scold him? It’s a common dilemma. Resolving to do a bit of both, she joins him on the floor lets his golden head fall on her shoulder.

“Mallory.” He grasps her hands in that death grip he gets when he’s frustrated. “I can’t stand it, all those people… all that pointless chatter about everything, and nothing… I want to snap Estrada’s neck… Why did we invite this horror into our home?”

Content to spend every waking and sleeping moment with her, ideally inside her body or pressed up against it, Michael genuinely doesn’t see the point of socializing with other people outside of his cases. When he’s feeling soft, which is most of the time now, all he wants to do is twine his fingers in her hair and breathe in her scent while listening to her heart beat through the rise and fall of her chest.

“Let’s go back to the party. A little socializing won’t kill you.”

“It will. It’ll be bore me to death.”

They’ve talked about this. It’s becoming a problem. The possessive turn of his mind scares the living daylights out of her at times, even if she knows he’s only joking. Like when he tells her that the mere existence of a world outside their relationship is reason enough to blast it with a thousand nuclear bombs.

“No, it won't. It'll be good for you, talking to more people."

He sighs, making a move as if he’s about to get up; but it’s a ruse. Imperceptibly, his hand has drifted up her thigh and is slipping under her dress, bunching up the black chiffon to expose the matching black panties beneath. Soon, he’s breached the band of her panties and she’s letting it happen, letting his fingers play slickly over her entrance, as if gathering proof of her arousal.

“Look how wet you are for me already.”

He’s breathing heavily now. If she doesn’t put a stop to this soon, there’ll be no going back to the party. And if their guests go looking for their missing hosts, they’ll find them here, limbs entwined in a sticky mess, lost in each other in a museum of demonic artefacts.

“After the Judas Kiss, you can do your thing with the rope,” Mallory whispers. It takes all of her self-control to clamp her legs shut and trap his moving hand between her thighs before she unravels any further.

Michael rolls his eyes. He doesn’t like her choice of words.

 _Your_ thing with the rope. _Your_ shibari. And if it's not for her too. She wants it just as much as he does and will be cumming harder than she’s ever come once she’s in those ropes.

“Can’t we send them all home now? We can fake a fire. Better yet, we can start one. Which do you prefer?”

“Neither. We shibari on three conditions. One, no arson. Two, we make it a Judas Kiss to remember. Three, the guests go home happy, all in one piece.”

“Careful, Mal. You’re making it sound an awful lot like a reward for good behaviour.”

“Isn’t it?”

A shadow crosses his eyes, a gathering darkness. He can see in her eyes how badly she wants everything that he plans to do to her, and it’s tearing him apart that he can’t do it all to her right now, this very minute.

“Deal.”

*****

 

The Judas Kiss went better than expected. Those who had someone to kiss leaned into the unholy tradition with occult gusto.

When the clock struck midnight to herald Christ’s betrayal by Judas and imminent arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, Dominique Aguillard kissed her fiancée under the big sprig of olive in the hallway.

Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt kissed Gabriel Estrada, slipping him some tongue after freshening up with a whole pack of breath mints. 

Andre Stevens and Mr Gallant kissed each other, but not before rolling their eyes at the inanity of the holiday that Michael and Mallory invented. (Unbeknownst to the couple, a BEK watched them kiss through a crack in the curtain.)

Holly Cooper kissed no one. She was out on the fire escape with the smokers, crying into a bottle of wine and a half-eaten pack of Oreos while Mrs. Hudson, who’d gone out to look for Mallory’s cat when someone left the window open, consoled her with a century’s worth of stories about her disappointments with men.

Marie Laveau also kissed nobody, though not for any lack of takers. The voodoo queen was no longer in the building once Good Friday rolled around, as she’d slipped out unseen an hour earlier to attend a better party in Brooklyn.

Did Michael Langdon pull Mallory Watson into a kiss so carnal it would be grounds for a citizen’s arrest if it happened in public? He did, but no guests were around to see it. Everyone had gone home by then.

When the last guest stumbled out the door and into a waiting Uber, they didn’t bother to clean up. Dishes could wait. Broken glasses and olive sprigs could be swept up later. They had better things to do, now.

He’s been looking forward to this all day, to binding her in triple-twisted hemp rope, all two hundred and fifty feet of it to restrain one small girl. It felt odd, like using a bazooka to take down a bunny, or a battering ram to break into a candy store.

But Michael wanted total submission and Mallory was only too happy to give it, and now she’s hanging from the ceiling in his bedroom, which is their bedroom these days, unable to move, barely able to breathe from sheer excitement. He could have used magic to achieve the same effect; but to restrain her with his mind as he fucked her would take that little of bit concentration that could be spent elsewhere, like on actually fucking her.

It’s a weird feeling being suspended like this—she’s weightless, floating in space, while deeply feeling her own materiality at the same time, her flesh contorted in all directions by the ties.

He tied multiple ropes to a single exposed beam on the ceiling, an architectural feature of the brownstone that Andre admired so much at the party. Her torso is angled in the air and legs tied and spread wide to allow for easy access. Her arms are secured behind her back in what feels like challenging stretch, while a pentagram-shaped harness criss-crosses her upper body around the suspension points. Single column ties, as Michael calls them, hold the whole system together, rigging her wrists and ankles and thighs and hips and shoulders into a design that is equal parts form and function.

They debated using a blindfold, but he wants her to see her surroundings even as she’s unable to move or scream.

“If I let you use your voice, you’ll wake everyone all the way to the Bowery,” he told her before fitting the scarf in her mouth, but the truth is that it’s an aesthetic choice much like ropes. When he steps back to survey his handiwork and enters her field of vision, the familiar darkness returns to his pale blue eyes.

“Can you move?”

She tries, but fails. It excites him to see her fail.

“Not even a little bit?”

He’s walking around her slowly now, like a predator circling its prey, admiring the way the ropes dig into her skin as she flexes her muscles and nothing happens. A single finger runs down her flank, gliding over the curves and dips created by the restraints. The multiple ties around her thighs create pockets of delectable flesh, while her breasts protrude through the harness so adorably, their peaks hardened with zero stimulation, just from the pleasure of the bindings. 

“I don’t think I can wait, Mal,” he mutters while circling her one final time. There was so much he planned to do before penetration, but now he just can’t control himself so he’s already aligning himself with her entrance, which is perfectly positioned in the air at the exact height of his groin.

“Hold still,” he commands, as if she’s got a choice. Hearing him laugh at her inability to escape sends a pulse deep into her cunt, which is more than wet enough to take all of him when he penetrates her in one go. All she can do is take his thrusts, each one going deeper, filling her up more, until—

Until his phone rings.

It shouldn’t ring because it’s supposed to be turned off. Why didn’t he turn it off?

Michael helpfully removes her gag before he goes to see who’s calling.

“Estrada. Hello?”

The detective better be calling with the emergency of the century, but Mallory’s angrier at Michael for leaving his phone on and then deciding to answer it.

“Okay… slow down… one thing at a time…”

The look on Michael’s face as he listens to the other man tells her nothing. Brow furrowed and lips pursed, he looks no less intense than he did a moment ago when he was balls-deep in Mallory.

“I see… are they sure it’s him?”

Michael’s eyes are glued to her as she hangs there in the ropes even as he talks with someone else on the phone. He’s pumping his painfully red cock with his fist, keeping it hard for her as Estrada drones on and on about Satan only knows what. If the detective were better at his job, he’d realize something was off from the heavy breathing and faint slapping sound.

Finally, something changes in Michael’s features, going from erotic concentration to mild interest in whatever the detective is talking about to full-blown focus. 

“Got it. We’ll be on the next train to the Catskills.”

He hangs up and then promptly leaves for the study, leaving her in the air like a juicy fly ensnared in a spider’s web and feeling the vibrations of the approaching spider. With Michael in the room, she felt vulnerable in the most delicious way possible. Without Michael in the room, she just feels vulnerable, like she might be forgotten and left to dangle overnight. 

A few seconds later, though, he’s back with a box of case files that just couldn’t wait until he finished fucking her into oblivion. His cock is still hard, though, she notes with annoyance. Does he love his investigations more than her?

Clearly not, as he’s looking her over with the most regretful expression imaginable, like it’s killing him inside that he has to untie her. You’d think it was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, and this is a man who’s taken souls out of Hell that Hell fought very hard to keep.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mal. I’d drop this investigation in a heartbeat if you asked me to, just like I’d drop any case that you didn’t like. But lives are at stake here, and if I know anything about my beloved witch, her kind heart would never allow pleasure to come before someone else’s safety.”

Her "kind" heart wouldn’t? He must not know her as well as he thinks.

“Let me guess: Baskerville’s back.”

“That’s debatable. _Something_ that looks like Baskerville has returned from the woods.”

“That should be interesting. I guess you’d better untie me so I can get dressed for the train.”

Michael looks pensive for a moment, then smiles and goes to open his own closet.

“No, I think I’ll leave you hanging there while I get dressed.”

“Michael!”

Smiling, he walks up to her and bends down to kiss her lips while stroking the puckered and bound flesh of her upper arms.

“I’ll make it up to you later, my beloved. That’s a promise.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two staples of the Sherlock canon appear in this chapter. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Inspector G. Lestrade becomes Detective Gabriel Estrada of the 9th Precinct, which serves the East Village. Canon Lestrade overestimates his own abilities while underestimating those of Holmes. Mrs. Hudson is still the landlady, only now she’s a vampire like the Countess from AHS: Hotel. Another character I added is based on Molly Hooper from BBC's Sherlock, but she doesn't appear in ACD's work. I’m also expanding this Millory world to include urban legends from the Internet. The Black-Eyed Kids (BEKs) have been around since the 1990s. The Goatman is more recent, but he’s only one variant of the fleshgait/mimic creature that terrorizes people who are alone in the woods, often by imitating someone's voice. The “curious incident with the dog in the night-time” is a classic bit of Sherlockian dialogue from “The Silver Blaze.” The cryptid of the Baskervilles is a reference to the most famous Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The line about theorizing ahead of the facts is from “A Scandal in Bohemia.” 
> 
> Edited: This story is on indefinite hiatus until I get motivation to continue.


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